Solution to Evan Birnholzs April 2 crossword, On a Roll -

Hello from the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Conn. Just about everyone is here — the event got sold out for the first time since I began attending it in 2012. I’ll do my best, but the best I can hope for is to one day make the B finals. I’m not expecting that this weekend with this kind of turnout and with many faster solvers competing, but you never know. Mostly I’m here to spend time with the puzzle family during the biggest crossword reunion of the year. The standings are posted here if you want to track them, and I imagine there will be a handy YouTube link posted on the main site if you want to watch the finals later on Sunday afternoon (but don’t quote me on that).

Today’s Post puzzle has a meta, though, which means it is decidedly not a tournament crossword.

The instructions to the meta say we’re looking for a six-letter word. The first thing you’d normally do is to look at the long answers which are usually thematic … but are they? There are a pair of 12-letter answers near the center of the grid (SEVEN SAMURAI at 34D and ACADEMICALLY at 38D) crossing 10-letter answers (DON’T BOTHER at 60A and TV PRODUCER at 78A), and each of these answers form part of a wide open section of white squares. This is already an odd setup; why not spread these longer phrases out farther apart like in a typical crossword?

Instead, you’ll find two key hints in the clues to a pair of three-letter answers:

63A: [What an O resembles after you shade it in (as you should 21 times)] is PIP.
77A: [One of six objects hidden in this puzzle’s 5×5 sections of white squares (and where you need to find the letters matching the value shown there)] is DIE.

These two clues, along with the puzzle title, should give you the first real insight: This is a puzzle about dice. So let’s look at those clues for PIP and DIE again. There are six dice hidden in the puzzle, there are conveniently six 5×5 sections of white squares, and you are told to shade in the letter O 21 times. Start shading in the O’s in those 5×5 sections and you’ll see the six dice, representing all six rolls from 1 through 6:

Okay, but now what? We have the six dice rolls, but it might not be immediately clear how to extract a six-letter word from that. The parenthetical instruction to the DIE clue says “you need to find the letters matching the value shown there.” One idea you might try is to take the first letter of die 1, the second letter of die 2, and so on … but this won’t produce a real word. (Before I added that parenthetical information to the DIE clue, my test-solvers reported trying several other creative but incorrect paths, like attempting to replace the O’s with other letters, drawing lines between the pips, as in connect-the-dots, and even “rolling” the dice so that each 5×5 section would be rotated!)

The easiest way to crack this might be to look at the dice with the higher rolls. Do you notice anything peculiar about the 5×5 sections for the 5 and 6 dice? They each feature many instances of the same letter. That is the key insight to solving the meta: Each die contains a letter that appears exactly the same number of times as the value of that die.

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The only letter that appears exactly once on the die with one pip is G. All other letters on that die are repeated.
The only letter that appears exactly twice on the die with two pips is A. All other letters on that die appear either once, or three or more times.
The only letter that appears exactly three times on the die with three pips is M.
The only letter that appears exactly four times on the die with four pips is B.
The only letter that appears exactly five times on the die with five pips is L.
The only letter that appears exactly six times on the die with six pips is E.

Take all of those key letters in the order of the dice, and you spell out GAMBLE.

There were three sources of inspiration for this puzzle: Two different meta suites and a video game. Longtime New York Times crossword solvers may remember Patrick Berry’s magnificent “Cross” Words Contest in October 2011, which was one of my first exposures to metas and is among my favorite sets of crosswords ever written. Paolo Pasco’s extremely clever “Remedial Chaos Theory” suite from September 2022 made great use of dice as both a puzzle mechanism and as a storytelling device. Most recently, though, my wife and I have been playing the game “Dicey Dungeons” on Nintendo Switch since the start of 2023. It’s a turn-based battle game where you can activate different abilities depending on the rolls of dice. The game gives you a good progression of difficulty as you proceed through the stages and it doesn’t take itself that seriously, which makes it fun to play without making you feel terribly frustrated if you lose.

All of these things got me thinking about how to incorporate dice into my own puzzle and, for a while, I’d assumed that the way I wanted to do it would be completely impossible. First, every O had to be placed precisely in their proper positions and there couldn’t be any additional O’s on the dice. Second, the target letters of G-A-M-B-L-E had to be the only letters matching the value of each die. And third, all of this had to take place in six different 5×5 clusters of white squares; I get enough headaches trying to accommodate one or two 5×5 sections in a normal grid, let alone six of them in a constrained meta.

I started with the 4 die because it seemed like it would be tough to incorporate four B’s along with four O’s, then I moved to the 6 die. I figured if I can somehow get six E’s to fit around six O’s in this 5×5 space, then the rest should proceed much more easily. Amazingly, I got through the 6 die much faster than I expected, but I was dead wrong about how easily the other dice would proceed. I can’t remember how many times I filled one of the dice more or less cleanly, only to realize that I had three E’s in addition to three M’s on the 3 die, or an extra unique letter in addition to G on the 1 die.

Although it wasn’t necessary, one thing I wish I could have pulled off in this puzzle was to have no O’s anywhere outside of the dice. I got closer to achieving that than I would have expected; there aren’t any stray O’s near the 6 die, and several of the remaining O’s could likely have been removed without too much trouble. The O’s just on the outside of the 1 and 5 dice, however, were basically stuck no matter what I did. So I abandoned that goal and let the PIP and DIE revealers do the work of explaining where to look and what O’s you’d need.

Just a few clues of note before wrapping this up:

72A: [www.brynmawr.___] is EDU. It’s my wife’s alma mater, so of course it was going into my puzzle.
80A: [Astro turf?] is HOUSTON. My favorite clue today.
109A: [One whom Weird Al advised to “work a little bit harder on improving your low self-esteem, you stupid freak,” in “Your Horoscope for Today”] is SCORPIO. I once used a “Your Horoscope for Today” lyric to clue VIRGO back in June 2018. I’m surprised I haven’t yet done the same for ARIES.
113A: [They’re on board, but they’re not on board with the captain] is MUTINEERS. My second-favorite clue today.
34D: [Akira Kurosawa’s “epic primal myth that pulsates through cinema,” per a headline in the Guardian] is “SEVEN SAMURAI.” I’ve never seen it, and I should correct that, but I am aware of how influential it was on action films and westerns that followed it.
53D: [Scorer of the “flying goal” to win the 1970 Stanley Cup] is BOBBY ORR. How could it have been a “flying goal”? Take a look for yourself. It’s one of the most iconic photos in hockey history.
104D: [Leave Boston or Chicago, say?] is GO SOLO. As in, the classic rock bands Boston or Chicago.

I’ll report back next week with more details about the ACPT. See you then.

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