CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2013 - Solutions

3C. Smaller and Smaller

There are five lines of puzzle clues, and five widely-spaced pentagonally arranged letters, suggesting that each clue (at least) provides a word joining two of the given letters. The outermost level of each clue (ignoring brackets for now) does this. Some clues are easier than others:

SERENADERS - The kind of people who like to calmly sing for a person
SUPERADDED - Added on top of a previous addition
DEFLOWERER - Naïvely, a person who buys all the stock from a florist
ROADSTEADS - Sheltered offshore anchorages
SADDLELESS - Lacking a supporting structure for carrying a rider

The clues are all the same length (10 letters) and they fit into the five given pentagonally-arranged letters using a pentagram arrangement. They therefore have common intersecting fourth and seventh letters, which are also in the shape of a pentagon (E D E D L). These are used in the next step, solving the clues inside the first brackets:

ENSNARL - (and tangle them in a trap)
LIAISED - (after having acted as an intermediary in a dispute)
DIAPSID - (with reptilian openings in the skull behind each eye)
DRAYAGE - (allowing people to convey goods by sideless cart)
ENSLAVE - (which would deprive the beast of its freedom)

These clues are all seven letters long, and can also be arranged as a pentagram using the five intersection letters of the previous step. They have common intersecting third and fifth letters, which are also in the shape of a pentagon (S A A S A). Next, we solve the very innermost clues, made somewhat easier by the first and last letters, and the expectation that they will be four letters long:

AMIA - ((involving a genus of air-breathing fish))
ANOA - ((about a tiny buffalo))
ARMS - ((and limbs))
SINS - ((evils))
SORA - ((such as a small waterbird))

Each clue line has produced three words, each of the three fitted at a lower level, but at the same angle. With all clues solved and fitted, the puzzle looks like this:

At the lowest level, the intersecting letters are the second and third letters. These letters form a pentagon of the word MINOR, which is the answer to the puzzle.

Puzzle design notes:

As you can imagine, this was quite tricky to create. I wrote a Python script to find sets of four-letter words that could be formed into a pentagon, that could then be used as seeds for a set of seven-letter words that used those intersections, that could then be used as seeds for a set of ten-letter words that used those as intersections.

The resulting solution is one of only a handful (using a standard Scrabble dictionary), and the only one that had any kind of a compelling answer.