Check out these two clues from the Sunday, July 12th puzzle:
- 6-Down: three letters, clue is [Historical period]
- 26-Down: four letters, clue is [Maple, oak, or pine, for example]
The first one was ERA, of course, a standard clue for what is (by far) the most common entry in all of crosswords. The second was TREE, as any 7-year-old could've told you.
Except that they weren't: the answers were AGE and WOOD. Hey, it was a Sunday puzzle, the toughest of the week, so I set a few traps.
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Whaddaya expect? Yes, I clued those two words in those specific ways so you'd enter those specific wrong answers. Crossword writers are indeed that evil.
The main key for setting one of these traps is that the correct answer and the intended incorrect answer should both be the same number of letters, as in our examples above. A clue like [Capital of Spain] for the answer EUROS isn't that tricky since MADRID wouldn't fit anyway so the solver knows there's something funny going on. Much better is [Capital of France] since it fits, plus bonus points for PARIS having two letters in common with EUROS, so a solver with ??R?S will plunk the city down with confidence.
Pencil wavering uncertainty in hand, they will call out to a cruel and uncaring world: "How could PARIS possibly be wrong there?"
And somewhere, far away, a soulless crossword puzzle writer will cackle.
Anything trick you in this week's clues? Fess up that you got fooled by tweeting it at #beastxword.
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