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 (which posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
For the past couple months we've been having a summer songfest, with the answer to the weekly puzzle being a song title. A clip of the the song is then featured in the next week's diary. Last week's answer was Circle Game (performed by Joni Mitchell in tonight's opening clip).
These warm-up puzzles are intended to be 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.
Tonight's puzzle is a JulieCrostic.
If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, don't panic -- you'll find full instructions for solving JulieCrostics directly below tonight's puzzle. And to show you what a finished puzzle looks like, here's the completed grid for last week's puzzle .
shin C chins E niches
nary I rainy G grainy
isle R riles A serial
pear C caper M camper
papa L papal E appear
The verticals read CIRCL EGAME. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
Circle Game, one of Joni Mitchell's signature songs.
Tonight's puzzle has 5 rows, with 3 answers per row. Here are the clues. Hope you like the puzzle -- and hope you enjoy the featured song once you figure out what it is.
1. placed explosive devices
2. cut into little pieces
3. constantly present
4. snooped
5. within allowed playing area
6. people who leave stuff in hotel rooms
7. quarrels
8. secures
9. subordinate rulers
10. quantity of paper
11. tablet feature
12. alternative to knitting
13. little things
14. places to stay
15. things which require broken eggs
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.