Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly opportunity to have a little fun and to get your brain in gear for the regular Sunday Puzzle.
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be a new-puzzler-friendly. So if you've never tried Sunday Puzzle before, and are scared to dive in the deep end, come on and dip your toes in here.
And here's a little bonus: from now through September is Summer Songfest. Each week the acrostic verticals will spell out the title of a noteworthy song; and each week I'll include a YouTube clip of the song from the previous week.
Hmmm. Since this is the first week of Summer Songfest, the answer to last week's puzzle wasn't a song title. Oh well -- here's a clip of one of my favorite songs:
So you know "Song for Jacqueline" won't be the answer to tonight's puzzle. What will be? Come on down and find out!
This is a JulieCrostic. If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, don't panic -- full instructions can be found directly below tonight's puzzle.
Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 3 answers per row. Here are your clues:
1. people who put their faith in Palin
2. trades
3. overwhelms
4. kind of wave
5. gleam
6. turning points
7. famous female singer
8. applaud
9. stick together
10. horse
11. kind of noodle
12. demeanor
13. sleeping places
14. waits
15. next to
For those of you new to Sunday Puzzle, here's an explanation of
How JulieCrostics Work
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns. For the warm-up puzzles on Saturday I generally tell you how many rows and columns there are in the grid; for the regular puzzles on Sunday that's usually left to the solvers to figure out.
All the rows in the grid will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of answers). All the answers in a column will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of letters). And the words in each column are one letter longer than the words in the column to its left. That's because...
Each word in a row has all the letters of the word before it plus one new letter. For instance, if the clues for a row were (1) Alaska governor, (2) mountainous, and (3) clarify, the answers would be PALIN, ALPINE ( = PALIN + E), and EXPLAIN ( = ALPINE + X).
Write the added letter in the space between the word which doesn't have it and the word which does. For the row in the example you'd write:
PALIN E ALPINE X EXPLAIN
When you have solved all the clues and written down all the added letters, the added letters will form columns that spell out a message of some sort. It might be a person's name, it might be the title of a book, it might be a familiar phrase, or it might be a series of related words. Your challenge is to solve all the clues, fill in the vertical columns, and figure out what the vertical columns mean.
To show you what a completed puzzle looks like, here is the solution to last week's puzzle.
new S news O Snowe
red U rude N under
ere M Mere G merge
ire M mire F Fermi
pet E Pete E tepee
hot R Thor S short
tea S eats T state
The verticals read
SUMMERS ONGFEST. When properly spaced that spells out
Summer Songfest.