Lexicon Devil – Super Secret Contest Meta!

Crossword: I don’t recall how long it took me to complete the grid, sorry
Meta: 2 months!

G’day from Australia! benchen71 here, with a special meta writeup. This is not one of Crossword Fiend’s regular meta contest writeups. But I’d like to share with you all a super fun contest meta that launched on the 1st of August 2024 and was initially scheduled to close on the 31st of December, but the deadline was extended somewhat indefinitely into 2025. In a nod to the usual meta contest, there were to be mug prizes: one to the first solver and then one to a random solver drawn from the remaining solvers. However, apart from those mugs, this was not your regular meta contest, let me tell you! Because crossword constructor Ricky Billingsgate, instead of simply posting crossword files, released an instrumental hip-hop EP entitled “Checkered Future” on Bandcamp. If you bought this EP (pay what you want), included in the download was the meta crossword. Another sign that this was not your average meta contest, the meta hint was as follows:

The meta contest answer is… ? ??????????????????????????????

Ooh, mysterious! And the completed grid doesn’t give much away either, with no obvious meta hints in the grid or clues. Here are my initial observations taken from my notes:

1. Suspicious pairs of double letters in the 3 long answers: DD DD, DD DD, and CC CC.
2. A few other double letters in other entries.
3. Suspicious dupe of 32A. VET in the clue for 1D.
4. Possible hint in 48D {Snaky shapes} ESSES. Mechapuzzle tells me there are more Ss in the grid (22) compared to normal (17). There are also more Ds (13 compared to 7).
5. The following letters are not in the grid: J,Q,W,X,Z.
6. The puzzle number is #88, and a chess board is 8×8.

In the Q&A on Ricky’s site the following appears:

Are there clues in the other tracks?
Probably not, in the audio at least, but listen to them just to make sure.

Here’s the track listing of the EP:

1. Desprez 02:34
2. Clemenz 02:42
3. Grob 02:26
4. Ware 03:15
5. Benko 02:28
6. – 01:00

Wait a sec! There were only 5 tracks listed on Bandcamp. When I gave the EP a listen I couldn’t hear anything meta-related going on in the first 5 tracks. But at the 22 second mark in the “hidden” track 6, underneath the music, you can hear someone talking. Ooh, this might be the hint I so desperately need! I did my best and worked out most of what was being said. (More on that anon!)

However, I also looked up the chess opening represented in the album cover image (image to the right) and learned that it’s called the Desprez opening (with a lot of alternate titles: Kadas, Anti-Borg, Samurai, and possibly even Harry’s). Significantly, though, “Desprez” was also the title of the first track on the EP! I then had what I thought would prove to be a major break-through when I noticed that the other tracks were also named after chess openings:

1. Desprez = h4
2. Clemenz = h3
3. Grob = g4
4. Ware = a4
5. Benko = g3

I immediately tried to apply these locations to the grid, starting with the bottom left corner, and it spelled CLOSR. I wasn’t sure if this was a hint to keep going, so I made a template of a chess board with holes in the appropriate places, and passed that over the entire grid (ignoring places where a black square appeared in a hole). Sadly nothing came of this.

But what about that talking in track 6? In order to clarify a couple of the words, I used a website to isolate the vocals from the music and it turned out to be the voice of a man with a vaguely-European-sounding accent saying:

Simply by attacking the rook with the king, as she does, not once but twice, she attacks the rook, the rook, the rook has to move one square away and then she attacks with the king again.

Working off chess notation, I noticed that there was only one K in the grid and it was suspiciously diagonally next to a DD, as if it was attacking a rook (although in chess notation a rook is R). But that didn’t lead anywhere, and I was now officially all out of ideas.

So I reached out to a meta-solving buddy (ajk) on Discord who has more chess experience than I do. We batted things around a little without much success. We were particularly puzzled by the meta hint and the audio hint. At one point ajk said:

wonder if the Queen’s Gambit tv show is going to be important
hope not, as I haven’t watched it 😆

I replied that I had seen it, but that I didn’t remember that specific quote coming up in the show. But then we had a lucky break-through. As I was searching YouTube for Queen’s Gambit related material, I came across the following video, after first recognising the voice in the audio hint from another of his videos:

The quote that Ricky buried in track 6 starts around the 1:37 mark. ajk’s chess knowledge kicked in at this point: the Queen’s Gambit is also an opening move in chess:

1. d4 d5
2. c4

And suddenly we are back in the grid:

• 20A {Pappy’s pappy} GRANDDADDY has 4 Ds
• 33A {Spun one’s wheels, in old-timey terms} FIDDLEFADDLED has 5 Ds
• 50A {___ Decameron (famed 14th-century Italian narrative poem about Florentines  fleeing the Black Plague)} BOCCACCIOS has 4 Cs

… which can only mean that the meta answer is THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT. How does that relate to the meta hint? My guess is that the first question mark has moved away from the others. So it symbolises “an opening move”.

[Edit: Wrong! It turns out there were a few things that I missed with this puzzle which only came to light when Ricky posted his own answer write-up last week. The question marks were supposed to be read as “1 30”, to be read as the date “1/30”, where 30th Jan. 2024 was the date for a Lexicon Devil puzzle which contained one entry related to chess: ISOLATEDPAWN, with the clue {Possible Queen’s Gambit outcome}.

A couple of other things I missed that Ricky mentions in his write-up:

• If you zoom in on the cover artwork, you’ll find a row of white dots along the seventh rank (row) that spell, in Morse code, LOOK AT 1/30.
• Track 6 has an unusual musical structure: a sample played 4 times (in 4/4 time), followed by a different sample played 5 times (in 5/4), then the original sample played 4 times (back to 4/4). The samples’ pitches have been altered to D, D again, and then C, respectively. They are from, respectively, the songs “White Room” by Cream, and “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath. Taken together, these musical features suggest the pattern white, d, 4; black, d, 5; white, c, 4.]

My thanks to Ricky Billingsgate for an ingenious contest meta. I particularly enjoyed the way it incorporated extra-grid materials and a modicum of internet sleuthing, making the whole thing feel a bit like a treasure hunt. And here’s hoping I’m the lucky recipient of the randomly-drawn second mug. 😁

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