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.
On tap tonight: a new JulieCrostic and a new Crypto-Gremlin. (If you're not familiar with these kinds of puzzles, don't panic; full instructions are provided.)
First up is the JulieCrostic. If you already know how JulieCrostics work you can skip down to the clues and start solving. If you don't, here's an explanation of how they work.
In JulieCrostics you are given a set of clues, such as these:
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns, like so:
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).
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. say what's not so
2. resting
3. concede
then the answers might be LIE, IDLE (= LIE + D), and YIELD (= IDLE + Y)
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:
1. LIE D 2. IDLE Y 3. YIELD
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.
In the example given, the verticals read
DAIL YKOS. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out
Daily Kos!
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. marries
2. Pearson and Barrymore
3. high waterproof boots
4. benefits
5. trigonometric function
6. din
7. little horses
8. slang term for communist sympathizers
9. fruit that's ready to eat
10. steeple top
11. hope
12. says good things about
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Warm-Up Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Warm-Up Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Warm-Up Party
SUNDAY PUZZLE / Warm-Up Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE / Warm-Up Party / SUNDAY PUZZLE
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Tonight's second puzzle is a Crypto-Gremlin.
Crypto-Gremlins are a special kind of cryptogram which cannot be solved by the online programs that run through every possible letter substitution, but which can be solved by creative reasoning. You can find a complete explanation of what makes Crypto-Gremlins different from regular cryptograms here.
Dust gnoe karafinomb inca qumct sttmu ston mia mnurt htsn gn kteca onowt bte cnb minma bte npa oaempnru, mia kteca yurrt otme dnffpaxunma btepb oaempnrumb.
* Wacktown Meme (ZnoouaQt'ca cujonmepa)
Helpful Hints:
1. Go to the American Cryptogram Association site and copy the text of the Crypto-Gremlin into the box of the handy letter-substitution tool they provide.
2. A good starting point in solving Crypto-Gremlins is to make a list of all the final letters of the encrypted words. This gives you a list of the vowels.
3. Another good starting point is to look over the encrypted text to see if there are any 3-letter words. If there's a word with the pattern consonant-consonant-vowel there's a good chance it's THE; if there's a word with the pattern vowel-vowel-vowel it's almost certainly YOU.
4. The bolded text is a quote; the unbolded text provides the source of the quote.