Twelfth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

 

Comments

Re: Puzzles - Galactic Puzzle Hunt (2025)

[(Anonymous)]

https://2025.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/round/aisle_of_crosswords

Only took a whole month, but I can finally share my least favorite round from this year's Galactic Puzzle Hunt. This year's gimmick is that you have to assemble all the puzzles yourself, and nowhere is that more obvious than when you open up the crossword round and are confronted with dozens of black and white squares and an entire array of unsorted and unnumbered clues.

Somehow, you're supposed to sort this out into three different crosswords, each with their own gimmick. Seems daunting, but the trick is that there's two distinct styles of crossword puzzles - British crosswords have cryptic-style clues and open lattice grids, while American crosswords have definition-style clues and fully checked grids.

With a little work, we might then identify that Debbie Downers is a British-style cryptic crossword where the wordplay for the clues are all missing -ER and Turtles All the Way Down is an American-style crossword that only has Across clues because the Downs are turtles, which leaves us with Across the Pond. As the name suggests, this crossword involves both British and American-style clues!

https://2025.galacticpuzzlehunt.com/solution/across_the_pond
^ contains spoilers (way more spoilers than I've already given!) but might be useful for visualization

The relevant pieces for this puzzle form an 18x12 grid, of which the left half is American-style and the right half is British-style. It's a bit of an oddly specific size, but the clues keep referencing a 'conflict' and the 'fray' and a 'leader' and it becomes clear that those dimensions were intentionally chosen because this puzzle is themed after the War of 1812. Final extraction involves catching 'spies' on either side of the war, which are cleverly-written clues that look like they could be of the right style, but are in fact solved in the other style.

Re: Puzzles - Galactic Puzzle Hunt (2025)

[(Anonymous)]

Anyways, now I can claim I hate cryptics because of patriotism.