by Ross Trudeau
I’m posting this week’s puzzle from Bretton Woods, site of the eponymous international monetary system, where temperatures today hit -17 (without wind chill). Our hotel sits under Mount Washington, where conditions are apparently historically inhospitable to human life. We’re in New Hampshire for a wedding, and in a funny little bit of symmetry, the grooms were also at our wedding this past summer on a 98 degree July day in Cambridge, making the temperature difference at the time of our respective nuptials a comical 102(!!!) degrees.
God knows if I’ll be in any sort of condition to participate in the Boswords Winter Wondersolve tomorrow, but in any case I’ll be tuning in on their Twitch stream. You should too! I got indispensable test solving feedback this week from cherished collaborator David, Sam, Migo, and Crucinova co-owner Gavin. Thanks, friends! A couple of spoilers/thoughts for “Middle Child Syndrome” below.
Prime example of a puzzle that was really irritating to wrangle, and perhaps not ultimately worth the time sunk into it. That’s not to say I don’t think it’s a good puzzle, but rather the work:payoff ratio was just… high.
The fact is that there are just very few ways to hide a hidden HEART (ahem) string, specifically if you need to introduce a word break somewhere among those letters. After that, there were also very few “kid” synonyms that had a K, I, and D in them, in places that were amenable to laying them out in a vertical orientation to produce the desired effect. (The HEART BREAK KID in the puzzle reflects the interrupting K, I, and D, as well as the words that bear those letters: TYKE, MINOR, and LAD.
Also, I went back and forth for a while on how to clue the revealer. My apologies to WWF/Shawn Michaels fans, who will 100% remember him from his pretty boy heel days as The Heartbreak Kid.
Happy solving, friends!
-Ross