The Sphinx's Lair

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1:20 AM

This is part 10 of the puzzle series Around the World in Many Days. Each part is solvable on its own. Deаr Puzzling, This is a word search puzzle with a wildcard character. There are eight unique letter in the grid (A, B, E, F, I, L, S and T), and the question mark can stand for any letter exce...

oAlt

1:55 AM

Let's see if I can solve this while on the bus

oAlt

2:08 AM

Nah nvm doing it on mobile is still not the best

11 hours later…

AncientSwordRage

12:51 PM

C4 hint updated

2 hours later…

juicifer

2:43 PM

@AncientSwordRage GLASS broken over GOW(-ns) and KIS(-met) to get GLASGOW KISS, a slang term for a headbutt

oAlt

Oh my gosh, of course "broken" could be interpreted that way. And I saw "kismet" for "fate" in MW but I completely forgot about "unmet" in the clue. facepalm

And nicely found. I don't think I would have gotten that at all

Turns out I was focusing on the wrong end of the clue, and also Stiv's and Jafe's theory was right

juicifer

3:00 PM

yeah I absolutely wouldn't have gotten this without the hints, and even then it took me a while to figure out how the wordplay worked

but once I was put on the track of seven letter words starting with g and uk place names, glasgow came to mind pretty quickly and glass made sense for bottle, so it was just a matter of looking up the right phrase

AncientSwordRage

3:33 PM

@juicifer exactly that

Too hard?

juicifer

I don't think it was too hard, there were just a lot of different possibilities for a lot of the words in the clue

CCCC: State agency captures mythical creature using force instead of charm (10)

oAlt

4:19 PM

I genuinely don't know if the "of' in the previous clue was valid (BUT other than that the cluing was perfectly fair and in fact I liked the "bottle broken" and "a fate unmet" parts)

oAlt

4:30 PM

@juicifer CALIFORNIA (state) = CIA (agency) captures ALICORN (mythical creature) using F (force) instead of C (charm)

--> c(ali(c->f)orn)ia

too lazy to edit again lol

juicifer

@oAlt yup you got it lol

oAlt

4:53 PM

CCCC: PSE user just unveiled interesting collage; it follows enigmatic riddle in the beginning (8)