Cracking the April-June 2008 Bonus Puzzle
On June 29th, the last Sunday of the April-June solving leg (Ladder #3), we offered our contest solvers a "bonus puzzle" of the highest difficulty -- Level 10 (World-Class). We asked those who managed to solve it to tell us their solving time and, if they liked, a brief explanation of how they went about solving it. Below are those elaborations.
Note that some solvers used the Solving Tool's built-in Word Search Tool (WST), and some did not. Both methods are equally valid, of course! We encourage our solvers to use whatever resources they have at their disposal -- whatever makes solving the most enjoyable. :-)
Below is the bonus puzzle image, in case you want to give it a try. If you prefer, use the PDF or the Solving Tool import file versions. Solution is posted at the bottom of this page.
Good luck!
Mike Neumeier of Cincinnati, OH writes:
It is funny how I roundabout solved this one. It took much longer than that Level 10 in your first mag. Odd is that I considered SUBJUGATE almost immediately, but then kept throwing it away because I couldn't nail any of the remaining grid.
I remember spending lots of wasted time on either STOVE or PROVE as the first phrase word and just could not get all the letters in there, and besides nothing was convincingly thematic. It wasn't until maybe 30 or 40 minutes into this that I restarted, chose other ST*** and PR*** to see if something turned up. A big step was trying out an "I" instead of an "O" (PRO*** replaced by PRI** figured into that; I had been reluctant for a long time, since "O" had felt so right).
Then it hit big, with trying that less often seen in grid, letter "Z" and the word PRIZE jumped out. Not long after, PRIZE FIGHT suggested itself. That GH was a good, hidden placement of medium frequency letters. (I think there is something to this...difficulty increases with short phrases that use less common letters... your P, Z, F, G, H were among these).
The only word I did not know was FLUMMOX, but as happens with a word one either does not know or forgot ever existed, I just backed into it. The solver program tells you you got it right ("Congratulations!"). FLUMMOX just sounded good, like a real word, and with the remainder I threw in there, it worked.
Howard Barkin of Hillsborough, NJ writes:
Took about 6 minutes, give or take a minute, I think. It helped that one approach I tried turned out to be a correct educated guess; there wasn't an apparently obvious place for any one letter to fit. I first attempted to find obvious places for the Z, J, or Q. I ruled out this strategy, however, due to the extremely open grid.
After a couple minutes of failing at this, the next plan was to test out possible candidates for the numbered spaces in the phrase. Looking at space 1, which appeared at the end of a word (7 A 9 1), this led me to guess that 1 was most likely to be a D or an E, with an outside possibility of another letter (never rule anything out!). I started with an E as the most likely fill here.
Realizing that the latest letter in the phrase (9) would appear later in the alphabet, I toyed with various combinations of later letters, such as T, V, and Z. As I couldn't determine for certain what letters worked here, I kept the 9 in mind, and switched focus to the 2, which started the word 2_U_M_ _. Knowing that the 2 represented a letter after E, I started from F and attempted to fit words into this slightly unusual pattern. Here's where I caught a break.
Knowing all the letters must be used, I tried out the word 'FLUMMOX' here, which used the X and gave me a phrase of (6 7 5 9 E F 5 3 4 8). This looked promising, so from here I decided to play some 'Wheel of Fortune' and attempt to fill in letters here, as I would a cryptogram. Seeing that the '5' appeared twice, I ventured that this was a vowel (I or O), an L, or an R. I or L would be most likely due to its number 5 order. With (67 I 9E F I 348) now in place, I could now logically conclude that 3 and 4 had to be G and H (if my guesses were correct), since F=2 and I=5.
Filling that in gave me a phrase of (6 7 I 9 E FIGH 8). The 8 then coded to 'T', and I then played Wheel of Fortune to guess the completed phrase as 'PRIZE FIGHT' - the letter order worked out, and 9=Z turned out to be correct. (This also resolved the ambiguous word _AZE). With the phrase (hopefully) in place, I entered the letters in the grid, observing that no obvious words were incomplete.
After a minute, there was only one word I could come up with that fit a Q using the letters I had left; VANQUISH on the first vertical word. This resulted in SU_ _ UG_TE, which using the remaining letters, decoded to SUBJUGATE. Now we only have cleanup left to do - five letters unused, {C, D, K, W, Y}, and the words _OP_ and _RE_ _. There was only one place to fit the K, and with the remaining letters, I worked these out to be WRECK and DOPY.
So now you know. And knowing is approximately 9/16 of the battle, give or take. The rest is educated guessing and a little dumb luck :-)
Audrey Muratore of Houston, TX writes:
In this house, we never get to concentrate on anything. SOMETHING happens. In this case, my storm door exploded (yup!) So, I had looked at the puzzle and might have been processing in my head while I cleaned up the glass and got a friend to take the door off its hinges so I wouldn't slash the mailman. Total time I spent *sitting* with the puzzle was about 1/2 hour. After I realized that the "ox" option for the __u_m__ word was correct, and the word was FLUMMOX, I finished in less than 5 minutes.
Strategy: I usually do your puzzles by working the phrase and the "most helpful" word together. "Most helpful" = either the one with the weirdest letter pattern (like FLUMMOX) or the one with the most letters that appear in the phrase. Once you have the phrase, you don't have to work as hard on the other entries. In this case, I had a hint...because I suspected a theme that had something to do with a hard puzzle....so once I had FLUMMOX, the rest was history
Thanks! I enjoyed this one very much! I hope you do "Level 10"s regularly!
Noam Livnat of Lev Hashomron, Israel writes:
I'll make it brief: the key was the word SUBJUGATE. Using the given letters in the WordSearch tool, and keeping in mind that the number 3 which follows the letter U cannot be anything around the R or S letters, you go for 3=G. the general idea of a war or a battle is now in the background. Now the letter E comes to mind as number 1 'cause there is an A as a second letter in this 4 letters word, and 9=Z comes to mind. Then F=2 is a must, and 'PRIZE FIGHT' actually presents itself… you get the picture.
I think that substituting the first U in SUBJUGATE with the second as a given letter could make the puzzle much harder.
Gary Sargent of Rockford, IL writes:
Load to Solving Tool at 2:48PM
2:57 - looking for a place to put QU+vowel, the 1st down could be VANQUISH; the numbered spaces are reasonable,
and EIGHT, FIGHT become candidates for the 2nd word of the phrase
3:07 - Word Search tool offers SUBJUGATE for the 2nd across, this fits with both VANQUISH and FIGHT; after which
WST finds FLUMMOX for 2nd down
3:11 - letter 6 must be P or R, which suggests PRIZE FIGHT as the phrase
3:13 - with 5 letters left to place by inspection, WRECK and DOPY finish the puzzle in 25 minutes
An impressive puzzle. Every word is arguably directly keyed to the phrase.
Megan Glass of Lufkin, TX writes:
This puzzle took me about 30 minutes.
The way I solve puzzles is a little different than most. Sometimes I do not realize that there is more than one meaning to a word, so I pull up Dictionay.com to assist me with definitions, but this is, of course, after I have figured out the answer to the puzzle itself. Usually, once I figure out the theme, I am able to figure out the words.
I love the brain teasing these bring about!
Matt Dickey of San Diego, CA writes:
This took about 32 minutes. It was possible to limit the choices for RAZE considerably due to the need to match with PRIZE. WRECK made my short list of possibilities that used up no vowels -- wreck, crews, dreck, prexy, fresh, brews. M is a good choice to go between the U and the M, and there aren't a whole lot of choices (ignoring seriously weird gunk like SQUAMAE or ZEUGMAS which use up too many precious vowels), so FLUMMOX is a good operating choice. SUBJUGATE isn't easy to see, but the SUB prefix was a highly probable starting point, especially as I couldn't see any words that had a Q in front of the given U. Once you stumble onto SUBJUGATE, it fills in the Theme sufficiently to make the rest simple.
