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.
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.
To show you what a finished puzzle looks like, here's the completed answer grid for last week's puzzle.
sin T snit H hints K thinks
red O rode A adore I roadie
age M mage R Marge N German
The verticals read
TOM HAR KIN. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
Tom Harkin -- who has been in the news recently for his efforts to
expand Social Security and to
increase the minimum wage.
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 6 rows, with 3 answers per row, for a total of 18 clues. Here they are. Have fun!
1. generally found in jails
2. poets
3. confronts
4. places
5. looks sullen
6. faucets
7. windy weather plaything
8. child's vehicle
9. action taken by postal workers in 1970
10. polite fellow
11. hint
12. start a fire
13. fury
14. Fury or Rock
15. writer of "What Every Girl Should Know"
16. first woman to serve as attorney general
17. introvert
18. more drawn out