Before the week started, I really loved this puzzle. Then I decided to make it a titch harder and everything blew up. For those who did not figure the theme out, the answer to 9 down was “Periodic Table”. Every intersection square held an elemental abbreviation from the periodic table of elements. Once you were able to figure out the theme, the clues were pretty straight forward.

I lied when I said I messed up spellings and such. That was just cover for what really happened. I originally had all the intersecting squares shaded gray. I also had non-intersecting squares as element abbreviations. I decided this was maybe too big of a hint, plus I thought the non-intersecting squares that were abbreviations might be too cruel. So I went about unshading squares and then expanding words that had elements in non-intersecting areas. Problem is, I missed the CO to start Cosmopolitan. Then I also forgot to expand the end of “Allocate”. I didn’t even have room to expand that.

Wait…it gets worse. Because I was not on the computer I uploaded the puzzle from originally, I had to work off of an older version stored in my email. Well that version had a worksheet in the Excel file that still had all the answers. One unlucky puzzler ran across this and brought it to my attention. Embarrassing. Other than that the week went great!

Congrats to Matthew, Kelly and Brooks who all mastered this puzzle, and extra applause for Matthew and Kelly who did it without using a Hint power.

Matthew — 23
Kelly — 23
Brooks — 23
Peggy — 20
Bret — 12

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