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.
NOTE: for an explanation of tonight's poll question, please see the tip jar.
Tonight's puzzle is a JulieCrostic. If you're not familiar with this kind of puzzle, don't panic; I'm about to provide full instructions. But first, a special haiku greeting to those who've been here before:
If you already
Know how JulieCrostics work
You may skip ahead.
First, to show you what a finished puzzle looks like, here's the completed answer grid for last week's puzzle.
pin T pint O pinto
don W down U wound
cur E cure R recur
sad N sand T stand
say T stay E yeast
par Y pray E payer
due F feud N unfed
The verticals read
TWENTYF OURTEEN. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
twenty-fourteen -- coming soon to a reality near you!
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.
Think you've got the idea? Then here's a brand-new puzzle all set for you to solve!
Tonight's puzzle has 3 rows, with 4 answers per row, for a total of 12 clues. Here they are. Have fun!
1. behave badly
2. temper tantrum
3. clues
4. behaves rationally
5. kind of fox
6. traveled by horse
7. like a lot
8. band employee
9. grow older
10. Gandalf
11. animated mom
12. kind of chocolate cake