Unwanted Visitors (Meta)

Figured out the meta (unusually) way before I solved some of the grid, especially the upper right! Thanks for another good one!

Well. Filling in the grid was a technical snag. But this was fun to work out! The extended weirdness is pretty surreal!

Good one, Ben. The grid was fair once I figured out what was going on.

The grid was hard for me but still a lot of fun. Thanks Ben!

I didn't have to fill in squares in Crosshare to submit.

I had the grid filled with the missing letters (INT RUD ERS), and Crosshare accepted that WHEN I hit “reveal puzzle.” But I also now see that I had the letter O instead of A for DAN / BAN(D)… thinking that the karate master is called a DON, so apparently hitting “puzzle reveal” corrects everything and lets you then try the meta?? (I thought it would just show the wrong letters, not change them for me!) For the meta, I was sure you were going to make us swap out letters for the downs (so LOIRE would have had a companion entry, both clued “region of France” for example .. and then you’d substitute that entry’s first letter for the I). Also intitially suspected something was up with some other paired entries (MEA culpa and my bad/SRY; ARGO/ERGOT…) but those of course were red herrings. This was fun! (YES, challenging grid… definitely needed google. “Dear Prudence” was not familiar, and I originally had guessed “Dear Provence” — which is actually a song in La Traviata, apparently — but of course that yielded INT-ROV-ERS, so clearly not the thing.)

Now on to solving the rest of the grid! Thanks, Ben.

Had everything but forgot to go back to read your hint so I had to "reveal" to get to where I could enter the answer.

Very good, and lots of fun after I caught on to the trick of mysterious grid! Thank you, Ben!

Interesting one. Saw DEAR PRUDENCE almost right away, and from there it was a fairly straight shot. Thanks for the puxxxe, Ben!

And... on the morning after. I realize if you place the INT, RUD,ERS into the grid instead of the Xs you get valid down entries. I thought this was a fun puzzle but it would have been so much more if that had been worked in somehow rather than the generic Xes.

Enjoyed that very much!

Oops, now I get that you're referring to Ring In the New, which did in fact take the first solvers many hours to get.

Tough grid! Interesting meta, too. As for the MGWCC, are you talking about the BODEGA one? There was actually a correct entry (mine) submitted before the puzzle was posted. Matt didn't want folks to know that it was so easily guessable, so he emailed me that he would be sitting on my entry for a while. It took weeks before I ended up on the leaderboard, but I'm there now, as is another solver who also guessed correctly shortly after the puzzle posted. (My "streak" is still wrongly interrupted there, though.)

Good one, Ben! I somehow had it in my head that the answer was a “plural verb” ! I had already figured the answer was 9-letters long (for the 9 x’s) so I was plugging in letters to get a verb! Duh! Once I looked at logical replacements for the x’s, then I found your answer! Fun! Thanks, Ben!

NIce construction. When I saw DEAR PRUDENCE, I thought there might be a parallel entry, e.g. HELP, with a yoke-clue (one that would work for both entries), e.g., "Beatles song," and similarly for the other two. The other two disabused me of such overthinking.

Interesting.... Of course, I didn't quite know how to fill in the blanks when Crosshare told me I had wrong letters, but "Reveal" fixed that for me. :P Thanks, Ben.

Great puzzle. Was so excited about getting the answer right away that I forgot to click the "enter for the prize" box, hah.

Suspected extra spaces for what seemed to be a few obvious answers that had one too many spaces to fill. Still I needed google help for the more obscure entries. "Dear Prudence" is what broke the meta wide open as to the missing letters. Clever execution.

Took me a while to figure out how to solve the grid. Fun - thanks!

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this puzzle. Completed the grid. Goofed around with the intruding letters. Tried lots of things. Was TOTALLY distracted by pea in the clue for SNERT. Looked at it on and off for hours. Finally saw COLEADERSHIP.
GREAT meta.

Loved the puzzle but the XXX thing was not intuitive.

I can see why the "pencil" admonition. It took me a few to see what was going on, but it got easier after that. Clever puzzle. I got the end first (because by then I saw what was going on) and was killed trying to make it marauders. Luckily I own a Weber grill and went back to the beginning.

Got confused by the fill the grid hint into thinking that those squares were just to be ignored (though in retrospect then they should have been just black I guess). Anyway, once I saw the fourth nudge it fell quickly (though like others I spent some time looking for alternate entries). Fun as usual, thanks.

oops, above should say third nudge.