Spoiler Saturday: Metapuzzles

The non-Facebook kind of meta.

I didn’t want to finish the Ubercross Abecedaria without trying my hand at a metapuzzle.

I know some readers of this feature are expert-level solvers and nodding along. Others will be asking, “What’s a metapuzzle?”

In crosswords, metapuzzles are ordinary crosswords that have an extra challenge tacked on. They’re a bit like the traditional horror-movie monster, always coming back from seeming defeat just to challenge you one more time before you can put them in the grave for good. (And no, I don’t know why we don’t call them metacrosswords instead.)

The meta challenge is usually given as an extra instruction, though occasionally it’s a hidden theme or coded message inside the grid, clues, or both. Some meta challenges can be simple, like the recent one from Matt Gaffney below.

The challenge was to think of a nine-letter university often featured in crossword clues. That became easier when solvers noticed the longest and central answers all shared some letters in common: SESAME SEEDS, VIETNAMESE, EXAM ESSAYS, MADE A MESS OF, SAME SEX, and JAMESON. The college located in Ames, Iowa would be Iowa State.

Other metapuzzles (or metas) take more work to get through. Pete Muller’s most recent meta, a collaboration with Mack Meller, was titled “Forest Sight” and warned users, “The meta is a famous singer.” That was less to go on, especially since there were no obvious “theme answers”…except maybe the combined 15- and 45-down. “Park structures usually constructed from timber” were PICNIC/TABLES.

Though they weren’t in the longest answers, you could still find six sources of timber in the grid: PINE, FIR, OAK, ASH, ELM, and TEAK hiding in SPINES, I’M ON FIRE, SOAKS IN, NATASHA, DEL MONTE, and STEAKS. If we make a “picnic table” out of each, then the legs of each table turn out to spell C-A-R-R-I-E…

…and Carrie Underwood is a famous singer.

The Gaffney and Muller examples above are samples of regular features, Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest and the Muller Monthly Music Meta. Both have been around for more than a decade. Other features like the American Values Crossword and the New York Times dabble in metapuzzles from time to time.

I’d call the “Carrie Underwood” example a mid-level challenge. Gaffney tends to save his really tough ones for the end of the month, Muller for the end of the year. The tough ones are usually elaborate and take more space to explain, but I’ll try explaining the answer to a hard one (done for Gaffney by guest constructor Pete Coulter).

For this one, the meta answer was given as “A kind of sandwich.” Coulter set up four sets of three items—two answers and one clue-answer pair—each interacting in the same way to give you one letter of the final answer. ASPENS becomes A-S PENS, and the letters A and S pen in the word SCRIBE in ASCRIBES. Same for CD CASES, for which C and D case AROUSE in CAROUSED; REHEMS, for which R and E hem in EDWIN in RED WINE; and INBOXES, for which I and N box in BERIA in IBERIAN.

The word “Scribe” appears at the beginning of the clue for WRITER, so W is a letter in the final answer. Same for “Arouse,” “Edwin,” and “Beria,” as seen below.

Occasionally, you’ll get a whole suite of metacrosswords that reduce to a single meta answer, like Paolo Pasco’s “Remedial Chaos Theory” or Patrick Berry’s “Crossing” Words Contest. So I knew metapuzzle challenges on the Ubercross scale were possible.

But what sort of challenge should I do? Tomorrow, I’ll go into how I figured that out.