The Sphinx's Lair

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oAlt

3:41 AM

Never thought I'd be visiting the Wikipedia page for Olympia this many times

bobble

what did you expect from this puzzling site

oAlt

Loll

1 hour later…

Amoz

5:12 AM

@msh210 maybe PLACE, listed as synonym for survey and where O is, is a place?

msh210

@Amoz Are survey and place really synonyms? In any event, that wasn't my intended solution, I'm afraid.

Jafe

6:10 AM

olympia is in WA, USA, and i assume Wausa could be a survey area for someone researching obscure nebraskan villages :P

(i looked up "nebraskan" because i can never remember which states have weird demonyms and which ones have what you'd expect)

TakingNotes

7:00 AM

@Sphinx This puzzle got removed for being off-topic, but I still crafted a solution and wanted to post it somewhere, so I thought I'd post it here: "Quiz-foxed bunk with every GP majuscule"

M Oehm

GP?

TakingNotes

abbr. for Guadeloupe, which uses the French alphabet, which uses the same letters as English does.

It's a far stretch but I think it's fair

3 hours later…

TakingNotes

9:48 AM

(You can save a letter by making "foxed" into "fox'd") :)

1 hour later…

TakingNotes

10:49 AM

(tell you what ev'ry is a valid form of every according to wiktionary)

Jafe

if a baa is a fish of the caa family and that family includes baas, caas and daas, is it ok to use "caas" to define "baas"?

as in, biologically a baa is classified as a type of caa but by common name some fish are baas and some are caas and those are separate groups from each other

Stiv

11:07 AM

yaas

2 hours later…

Sphinx

12:42 PM

Q: Cursed Knights and Knaves

You are packing up after a week-long stay at the Verity Inn. You came here, to Truth Town, to visit your friend but now it's time to go home. You feel in good spirits as you pack your bags. As you are leaving, however, your good mood vanishes when you are approached by the city's guild-master who...

Amoz

1:03 PM

CC help... Is it legal to use a substring indicator to get a bunch of substrings and have it adjacent to an anagram indicator to unscramble the final result As opposed to just unscrambling the adjacent word?

Eg End scrambled left sides of cats, dogs .. ca+do, then anagram to coda

Sphinx

Q: Cross ALL the Streams

This grid deduction puzzle is a hybrid of three puzzle types: Cross the Streams, Tapa and Star Battle; rules for each are summarized below. In this grid, every cell is to be shaded either red, blue, or purple; a purple cell is to be considered shaded both red and blue in what follows. The cells s...

logical-deduction grid-deduction

Amoz

More broadly can indicators leverage nesting where the nest order is not immediately obvious

Jeremy Dover

I tend to be more liberal cluing than others here, but I would view this as OK in principle. But with "left sides", you might be teetering on the edge of unfair; I think "Missile scattering members of the board (4)" to clue DART would not be fair.

Jafe

1:30 PM

yeah i don't think there's anything inherently wrong about selecting letters and then anagramming, just makes the clue harder

like you could have cows and dalmatians and have the letters in the right order in the first place

that said, letter selection is pretty flexible so it's usually possible to avoid the anagram

Sphinx

Q: Find the hidden message in the following equation. Warning(answer is not in verbal format)

Find the hidden message in the following equation. I'll answer this question if no one does in 15 days. Keep trying...

cipher visual algebra

Amoz

Can you elaborate on the left sides concern? Is that because it itself is not a valid indicator, or because of the nesting? Another one.. is "scrambling firsts of the board" valid for 'bot' within a larger clue? I agree doing this to synonyms or members would be unfair but am unclear if it is fair for simpler indicators

Jafe

i'd expect left side to mean one leftmost letter, but i guess side can mean "half" as well

Jeremy Dover

My hesitation on left sides is due to "sides" being ambiguous. I think I remember Deusovi mention being OK using sides for grabbing one letter each from multiple words, or for grabbing multiple letters from one word.

Like I said, not saying it's unfair, but getting closer to the gray area...

Amoz

The impetus for this is that I feel some substring indicators like cows and dalmatians example seem too simple, so I am tempted to make them harder

Sure let's pretend I said 'left halves' originally, didn't mean to throw in a second wrench

Assumings even that is right... there is a lot to learn

oAlt

1:42 PM

@JeremyDover @Amoz I agree with Jeremy here

Jeremy Dover

I think left halves would clean up any objections to the wordplay, but it probably is undoing the "more challenging" factor that you are seeking.

oAlt

On one hand, the letters are indeed there, but on the other hand, you wouldn't know which letters to pick and how they should be anagrammed

Jeremy Dover

But a bit of advice from experience: your clues will be better received if you focus on solid wordplay and surface, and worry about complication second. I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain that a cryptic clue is too easy.

The 10th cryptic clue might be too easy, but not the first :-)

oAlt

(Also I believe "substring" refers to the clue where a word is hidden in some text; in your cats dogs example, Amoz, I think that would just be called "letter selection" instead of "substring". But anyway, that's beside the main point.)

Amoz

Good to know, I meant to refer to letter selection, not substrings, if that changes any of the discussion

'Fish, cat, or dog heads' vs 'Fish, dog, or cat heads, flipped'; so the first is preferable as it is less complex. But if I had a case where I needed 'heads, flipped' in succession to make the English reading correct, at least it is not invalid, it sounds like?

Jafe

1:58 PM

yeah selection + reverse is fine

Amoz

The other impetus for this is surface reading seems to be improved if I can leverage nesting, but I agree nesting can start to make it unfair and don't know to what extent it is permitted

otherwise I am limited to letter selections in word order, if that makes sense

Jeremy Dover

A lot of this does depend on context as well. If you have a complex clue in a full crossword where you can get some crossing letter clues, that's different from a CCCC. You can take some more liberties and try to stretch in the former scenario. You may get negative feedback, but negative feedback, taken to heart, makes you a better setter.

Sphinx

2:52 PM

Q: Colorful Puzzle

This puzzle is based on the squares before the one that says, "what color is this?". This is a sequence of squares, try to follow the rule(s) for the puzzle. Can you solve it?