The Stack

Well, I’ve completed the Special Crosswords. The remaining Orneries fell in a single session. It’s a lot quicker to get these things done when you’re fully alert, and can get your mind into a thinking-of-words zone. But then, it’s also quicker to get them done when you already did half the puzzle in a previous session, and that’s probably the larger factor here.

That left just the sole remaining Clueless, which was one of the difficult ones I mentioned before, where all the words come in just two lengths and there isn’t much obvious constraint about what goes where. Such a puzzle offers no clean way to get started. The only workable approach I’ve found is trial-and-error, picking a space with lots of crossings and trying out each of the words from the word list in that spot and exploring the consequences until you hit an impossibility. If you’ve picked a good spot — which I didn’t on my first couple of attempts — then you eventually find a word that forces a lot of other words, and the pattern grows until not being right would be a weird coincidence. If you haven’t, you eventually find a few different words that don’t force anything much.

This last and hardest Clueless turned out to be the only one in Games Interactive 2 with a typo in the word list: the word “power” was listed twice and “loser” omitted, as if the extra power had forced the loser out. Fortunately, due to changes in the UI, I was able to get a perfect score anyway. In the first Games Interactive, if you tried to put a word in a place where it conflicted with existing letters, the game just didn’t let you. In Games Interactive 2, it lets you and it just overwrites any conflicting letters. And the way the word “loser” was situated, it had words crossing it at the L and S. So I could put “power” into its spot, then re-enter the crossing words to overwrite the P and W. I can’t help but think that there’s a metaphor in that, but I don’t know what.