Here's a quick warm-up puzzle which Page-A-Day Puzzles posted a few days ago. If it looks familiar, that could be because Will Shortz used it last November for the NPR Sunday Puzzle. (But he got it from the calendar -- just a little earlier than the rest of us.)
Take a certain sequence of seven consecutive letters of the alphabet and replace the second letter in the sequence with a U. Then rearrange the result to form a two-word phrase that names a container you might find in your refrigerator at home. What is this container?
Sunday Puzzle is a regular weekly series. It features puzzles suitable for group puzzle-solving.
But the puzzles in the Sunday Puzzle series can sometimes be a little intimidating to newcomers. So now there's also Sunday Puzzle for beginners, to give new people an introductory version of the types of puzzles you'll find in the regular series.
Today: a new 16-clue JulieCrostic you can solve. Here's the grid; you'll find the clues, and complete instructions, right below the fold. Have fun!
Today's JulieCrostic has 4 rows, with 4 answers per row.
Read the clues provided below, then fill in words to match the clues in the appropriately numbered spaces in the diagram.
Each word in a row has all the letters of the previous word in that row, plus one new letter. Write the new letter in the space between the answers. For example, if the answers in a row were HEARD, ARCHED, and CRASHED you'd place a "C" in the box between HEARD and ARCHED and an "S" between ARCHED and CRASHED.
When you have filled in all the spaces correctly, the columns formed by the added letters should spell out related words. It might be a person's name, such as CHARLES DICKENS (spelled out in two columns). It might be the title of a book or movie, such as GONEW ITHTH EWIND (spelled out in three columns). It might be almost anything. Your challenge is to figure out what the verticals say and what they mean.
Here are the clues for today's puzzle:
1. Study
2. Head of faculty
3. John who married Priscilla
4. Famous pond
5. Malt beverage
6. Wan
7. Bell sounds
8. Pass by
9. Hot beverage
10. Evaluate
11. Valentine's candy
12. Famous Dan
13. Deighton
14. Row
15. A pioneer of socially and politically themed comics stories
16. Wound
If you have trouble solving the clues, here's some help.
1. Many of the clues in these introductory puzzles are straightforward synonyms. Clues 1, 6, 8, 10, 14 and 16 in today's puzzle are synonym clues.
These are often good clues to start with. : go to an online thesaurus (such as the one at Thesaurus.Com), plug the clue into the search box, and look through the list of synonyms for likely words. then test out the likeliest candidates to see if adding or subtracting a letter gives you good letters for forming into the answer for the following or preceding clue.
2. Definition clues can also be easy to crack sometimes. Clues 2, 5, 7, 8 and 11 are fairly straightforward definitions of their answer words.
3. Name clues can be easy or hard, depending on whether I've given you the person's last name and you need to find the first (often easy) or I've given you the person's first name and you need to find the last (usually a bit harder). There's a last name clue in today's set which should be fairly easy (clue 13) ; a first name clue which is a little harder (clue 12); and another first name clue which would be hard if all I'd provided were the first name, but which shouldn't be that difficult because additional identifying information is given (clue 3).
4. Two of today's clues (4 and 15) are knowledge clues. These are things you may know and just need to call up from your memory, or may not know and will need to look up. The answer to clue 4 is something most solvers will likely know (and may be able to guess right away from the clue). The answer to clue 15 is more specialized and something you may not be familiar with, so this may be a good clue to set aside until you have solved clue 14 or clue 16 and thus have a better idea of what the letters are. Once you have the letters it should be easy to anagram them out, come up with a likely answer, and Google to see if that is the right answer.
Have fun! And if you have any questions or problems, just ask in the comments section; I or another of the Sunday Puzzlers will be hanging around to help. (I also check back in on the diary during the week, so even if you are late to the party please don't hesitate to ask for help or leave a comment.)