Tony
Atlanta, GA
I had to look at the answer key because I had ROTTED crossed with MOOD STONE and legit thought the puzzle might be broken. Guess my Gen X is showing, because being a child of the 1970s, that was glam to me. 😮🤷
I have a suggestion for the developers who maintain the online version of the puzzle: For puzzles like this where entering the answer in the squares can be a bit tricky, put something like an "Answer Entry Help" button somewhere prominent so we can get a clue on the format of the squares that the puzzle is expecting to consider itself solved. For this particular one, I tried entering YES/NO in each box, then just YES NO and YESNO, then YES in one box and NO in the second one. I was flummoxed as to exactly how the puzzle was expecting me to enter the words in the squares despite having the puzzle completely worked, and the Gameplay article hadn't been put up yet for me to come here and see what I was missing. It would have just been a lot easier if I had a button on or close to the puzzle that would have popped up something like, "Enter a single rebus word in each square for the down clue". I don't think that would give away too much of a hint, but would have made the mechanics of getting the site to recognize a solved puzzle easier.
Folks, I'm not looking to start an argument but I've been doing these crosswords online for almost a decade now. My current streak is several years long. I'm very familiar with trick puzzles, the rebus feature, etc. This is not just a rebus issue. You have a combination (YES across two boxes) going across and a different combination (NO) going down. Out of the thousands of possible ways to enter an answer, it was looking for one specific combination that didn't even have the letters for the across clues. I'm not asking that only entering [NO][NO] should have been rejected. If that's what you did without any fuss or muss, congrats! But please don't explain to me why it wasn't confusing, because looking at the comments here, it objectively was. I don't think that asking for some kind of hint on how a non-standard puzzle works mechanically is out of line. If they don't want to give away trick puzzles, they could just have it display generic "If you need to enter multiple letters in a box, click the Rebus button" kind of message, even on normal puzzles. I can't think of any good reason not to do it. It would help forego frustration and negative comments here that are not about the content of the puzzle (which I found really clever, kudos to Seigel), but the mechanics of the web app.
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