Rendezvous
◆ · By Devoid · Published about 1 year ago
Meta Prompt
You’ve intercepted a message between two crossword-loving criminals, who send their secret plans to each other by hiding things in their puzzles. Can you find the day (6), time (5), and place (6,5) of their meeting in the grid?
Checking for previous play data...
Leaderboard (updated hourly)
- kurtalert solved about 1 year ago
- benchen71 solved about 1 year ago
- I K Snamhcok solved about 1 year ago
- DIS solved about 1 year ago
- hoover solved about 1 year ago
Comments
Sign in with google to leave a comment of your own:
- kurtalert 🤓4:43 · about 1 year agoThis was very cool! The short film Rendezvous is amazing, too.
- Sendhil Revuluri 🤓4:59 · about 1 year agoBarred crosswords are always extra hard for me because (a) there are more squares to fill in and (b) a lot of the squares are unchecked. But I see how the structure really facilitated the meta!One nit: In 26D the clue parsed for me as singular when the entry is plural. Maybe revise to “and others”?And several confusions:
- I didn’t get 28D — not understanding why an EXIT sign is unique to a multi-story building.
- Also 19D — not seeing why SAFFRON “warms the mouth”.
- There was no way I was going to get 34A (especially with the unchecked square) so I just Googled it.
- 7D straddled the line between "I learned something new and cool" and "wut".
- Devoid constructor · about 1 year agoYeah some of these clues were a bit forced or rushed.
- 28D — this is partly a dialectal thing but it’s also a bad clue: in Britain, where I’m from, a multi-storey specifically denotes a large type of car park/parking garage with several floors, rather than just a building with several floors in general. I think originally I had ‘sign seen in car park’ or something but I knew that ‘car park’ isn’t familiar to American solvers, so I changed it to ‘multi-storey,’ not realising that that’s just as bad (if not worse)! I’ll change it to something a bit more normal.
- 19D — this was me getting carried away with the ‘warmer’ mini-theme. The idea is that saffron is a spice so it makes your mouth feel hot, but I’m not actually sure if that’s true at all as I’ve never tasted it.
- 34A and 7D — these words were largely necessitated by having EIFFEL TOWER stretching across the diagonal. Ignazio Silone is not somebody I’d heard of either, but his name seemed to have appeared a couple of times in the NYT so I figured it wasn’t crazy obscure. With 34A, I am a bit of a music nerd so I did know what it was before seeing it was the only word that fitted, but it’s still a bit obscure. Grids are the thing I find hardest to make, particularly in barred crosswords, which is why I’ve been doing barred metas with hidden words over the last few days to practise.
Thanks for your feedback, I’m still learning how to write good but original clues for straight crosswords.
- benchen71 7:07 · about 1 year agoFRIDAY jumped out at me; a slow parse of every set of 5 letters elicited LUNCH; and then a quick perusal of the diagonals revealed the last piece of the puzzle. Nice one!
- Devoid constructor · about 1 year agoThanks, Ben