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CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2013 - Solutions

4D. XYZ-Word

Assembling the Group 4 jigsaw pieces for this puzzle gives the following sets of clues:

Across

  • 3. Nocturnal bird of prey (3)
  • 7. Ancient capital of Japan (3)
  • 11. Ship built to save animals (3)
  • 14. Indian state with strong Portuguese influence (3)
  • 17. Conduct of negotiations between states (9)
  • 21. Modifier key (3)
  • 22. Donkey or other closely related equine (3)
  • 26. Hit another vehicle with one's own (3)
  • 28. Chinese philosophical "path" (3)
  • 32. Our Lady of Paris (5,4)
  • 40. Material to be discarded (5)
  • 43. Ones who vocalise loudly (7)
  • 45. Stiff plate on skin of fish (5)
  • 48. Untruth (3)
  • 50. Shear into two pieces (3)
  • 52. Jungle vine (5)
  • 54. For 6 and 15, it is 30 (abbr.) (1,1,1)
  • 56. Even score (3)
  • 57. What eyes do (3)
  • 59. A vote for the affirmative (3)

Down

  • 4. Armed conflict (3)
  • 6. An offer in an auction (3)
  • 10. Popular 1950s dance style (3)
  • 12. Capital of Italy, in the native tongue (4)
  • 14. Spirit flavoured with juniper berries (3)
  • 15. European mountain range (4)
  • 16. Play the part of a character on stage (3)
  • 19. A single mountain of 15 down (3)
  • 25. Useful for finding your way (3)
  • 27. Used to indicate recipient of a gift (3)
  • 29. Build a better one and the world will come knocking (5,4)
  • 30. Geologic time period larger than an era (3)
  • 31. Printers' measures (3)
  • 38. Island nation in the Caribbean (7)
  • 39. The Moor of Venice (7)
  • 47. Departs from an encampment (7)
  • 48. Temporary quiet periods (5)
  • 49. One of a series of steps (5)
  • 51. International security organisation headquartered in New York (2)
  • 53. Integrated circuit (abbr.) (2)
  • 57. Sneaky, like a fox (3)
  • 58. Seventh Greek letter (3)
  • 60. Tribal or ethnic groups (5)

In

  • 1. Federal legislative building of the USA (7)
  • 2. US-Canadian waterfall (7)
  • 3. Shrek is one (4)
  • 4. Warrant officer (abbr.) (2)
  • 5. Lick up water or milk (3)
  • 7. Consume food (3)
  • 8. Decilitre (abbr.) (2)
  • 9. Fantasy artist, Erol (4)
  • 10. Chaotic fistfight (5)
  • 11. Hold one's attention and entertain (5)
  • 13. Tethered toys flown in the wind (5)
  • 17. Mafia boss (3)
  • 18. Classical form of musical drama (5)
  • 20. Chinese dialect of Guangdong and Guangxi (3)
  • 22. Immeasurably deep pit (5)
  • 23. Long, narrow piece of leather (5)
  • 24. Tool used to stir a fire (5)
  • 29. First person object pronoun (2)
  • 33. Conjunction indicating either of two possibilities (2)
  • 34. Steel bar for guiding a train (4)
  • 35. Depression in a surface resulting from a blow (4)
  • 36. Female honorific, agnostic to marital status (2)
  • 37. Ratio of circumference to diameter (2)
  • 41. Artificial intelligence (abbr.) (2)
  • 42. Spectral element of colour (3)
  • 44. Covered with frozen water (3)
  • 46. Sixth note of solfege scale (2)
  • 50. Painted transparency used for animation (3)
  • 55. Male humans (3)

These look like crossword clues, but no grid is provided. Besides the usual "Across" and "Down" clues, there is a third type: "In". This suggests the clue answers need to be fitted into a three-dimensional crossword grid.

Once the clues are solved, the grid can be deduced by fitting the words together subject to the following reasonable constraints:

  • Intersecting words share the same letter at that grid point.
  • The clues are numbered sequentially running across the grid, then down (like a normal crossword), then in.

The following further constraints can be worked out as solving proceeds:

  • The size of the letter grid is 9×9×9.
  • Each of the 9 layers that consist of across and down clues possesses 180° rotational symmetry, which is the standard symmetry for crossword puzzles. (This symmetry does not extend to the slices in the other two dimensions, for reasons that will become clear.)

The resulting completed grids look like this:

solution image

By constructing the three-dimensional object formed from the grid cubes which contain a letter, and then looking at the shape from three orthogonal orientations, the following shapes can be seen:

solution image

These are symbols for three of the four suits of standard playing cards: diamonds, hearts, and spades. The theme of games is reinforced by the fact that many of the crossword answers are the names of board games, card games, or children's games (although they are deliberately not clued that way!):

The solution is the missing card game suit: CLUBS. We would also accept CLUB.

Puzzle design notes:

This was the second complete version of this puzzle created. The first version used an 8×8×8 grid, and the shapes produced when looking from the three different sides of the completed crossword grid were two letters D and an ampersand symbol - D&D - referring to the game DUNGEONS & DRAGONS as the solution. The game theme was present in the clues in the form of monsters which were clued from mythological or literary references, but which also happened to be Dungeons & Dragons monsters: Medusa, goblin, troll, etc.

Although two of our team test solved it successfully, it proved to be somewhat uncompelling, with a couple of ambiguities only resolvable by making the assumption that all of the two letter words (and there were a lot - more than in the final version) intersected two other words. Also the fact that the shapes formed meant there were no synmmetries at all in the grid made it difficult to picture what was going on. And the ampersand shape drawn with an 8×8 pixel grid was subject to misinterpetation.

So we did a group puzzle brainstorming session, looking for three other symbols that we could use to clue a solution. We decided letter shapes were too limiting, and cast about for recognisable icons that could be drawn with small numbers of pixels. The game theme led us to card suits, and we quickly drew up some recognisable forms for diamonds, hearts, and spades on a whiteboard in a 9×9 grid, leaving CLUBS as the answer.

This left me to rework the entire crossword to form those shapes. While doing so, this time I made sure to preserve what symmetries I could, and changed as many of the clues as possible from monsters to names of board or card games, that could be clued as non-game-related words. (So I could not use "chess", for example, as the word "chess" has no other meaning than the game.) I kept one clue (Erol Otus) from the puzzle's Dungeons & Dragons origin, but making sure to clue him as a fantasy artist, not a Dungeons & Dragons artist (the work for which is he best known).

And for those Douglas Hofstader fans, it did occur to me to use the letters GEB, but that seemed far too guessable from minimal information, so I deliberately avoided that.