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The message for the SE Admins is:
This can be found by looking at something hidden in the answers to each of the clues:
Albertan politician who succeeded Lucien Maynard (6, 7)
Approved for passport authorization (6)
Famous stage direction from The Winter's Tale (4, 7, 2, 1, 4)
Method of hiding messages undetected inside images, audio, or text (13)
...
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Here's the solved puzzle:
Given clues but missing numbers:
Clues for other missing clues
Process (as requested by Emrakul):
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The trick to this is that
The answers are:
The grid is filled like this:
And the shaded cells
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Salon is a news website - "eds" refers to "editors" here. The clue attempts to misdirect you into thinking of workers at a spa by putting the name at the beginning.
17
No U-Turn - as in the road sign
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It's a
The visually challenged rodents are
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"Heir" is usually pronounced with a silent H, so sounds like "air".
One meaning of the word air is a melody, such as "air on a g string".
"We hear" is a common idiom in cryptic crossword clues for homophones ie "sounds like".
So "melody, we hear" = "sounds like another word for melody" = "sounds like air" = "heir".
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You're on the wrong path: there's a different breakdown where the S is part of the confining word.
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That was a very, very nice puzzle! Solved this with a lot of help from @grc
Here's a step-by-step walkthrough of how we solved it.
Working out some clues
We figured that (#X of Y) probably meant that the clue answer had Y letters, and that we had to take the X-th letter later. Why some clues didn't have a #X we weren't sure, but the first clues we worked ...
13
I have so far solved about half of the "crossword" and it is clear that the answer is going to be
[EDITED after finishing it to add:]
And it does turn out that the regex clues alone are enough to nail it down, though I briefly thought they wouldn't.
Not that there's any extra information in it, but:
[EDITED some time afterwards because I noticed I'd ...
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Is the answer
Because
Also, the title is
Because
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Partial. The flavour text says that we're looking for something we've seen before "here". On this site?
Hint 2 says we should
The title
The method, then is to
Solving the clues:
The extra letters spell
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Broadly speaking, there are two styles of clues in British crosswords.
Ximenean clues (named after the pseudonym of Derrick Somerset Macnutt) adhere to a fairly strict recipe of [precise definition] + [cryptic indication], and are probably the sort of clues that American solvers would be most familiar with. For example:
• I feel wretched getting no Latin ...
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Gladys is in
Explanation:
where
Credit where due:
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It appears to be two clues in one:
"Chimpanzee, say" (answer: APE)
"Circus equipment has APE at the centre." (The letters "APE" are at the exact centre of the word "TRAPEZE".)
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The answer is
as in
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The answer is:
Reasoning:
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Final (credit to @jafe and @Mohirl for figuring out the rest of the clues, go upvote them!)
Rogue tries to follow templar leader
Law breaking, tasteless, sandbox entry
Scientific premise around martian origin?
Not quite a rapper, weird kid
Man tossing bound article?
Beginner to Hero: The planet rocks
Fantasy's heart found in ...
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I believe
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Standing on the shoulders of several giants, I can gather a complete answer.
Let's first solve the cryptic puzzles:
Then fill the blanks of the non-cryptic puzzles with these, and solve them:
Finally her location is revealed by
to be the
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Gladys is at
A part of the arm (5),
a continent's highest mountain (6),
an Australian capital (9),
a gardening tool (11)
A sea mammal (7),
an Egyptian riddler (6),
a form of carbon (8),
an online scamming technique (8)
Solved by Omega Krypton
A Himalayan city (5),
Viking afterlife (8),
hotheaded, reckless (9),
a maritime punishment (11)
A ...
8
The answer is
Mind-reading
Pop Star
Fashionable
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The cryptic part of the clue doesn't seem to cover the whole word, as far as I can tell.
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The final "question" is:
so I guess unlike the earlier Dice Star puzzle we aren't supposed to answer that question.
So, the words and "residual" letters in order of use are:
For the avoidance of doubt, I didn't find these all alone. I think I was the first to find these:
and also independently found these (though others may well have found them too):
...
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Your friend is
Explanations
Going ahead
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'Boil rocks' means 'an anagram of boil' ('boil' that's been kind of jolted around).
'Wood scrap' (noun) is what you get once you've burnt some wood: 'ash' (or maybe the author just intends 'wood', by itself, to mean 'ash' the species of tree - see comments below).
'In' means 'in the middle of'.
So it's an anagram of 'boil', in the middle of the word 'ash'....
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As I was typing this up, I figured it out:
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
