MGWCC #904

MGWCC crossword 4:41 
meta 15ish [4.94 avg; 9 ratings] rate it

hello, and welcome to episode #904 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 guest puzzle from Will Nediger called “Free Refill”. will’s previous guest metas for MGWCC have been both stunningly brilliant and (alas) often too difficult for me, so i approached this puzzle with both expectation and trepidation. this week’s instructions tell us that Will has failed to write two clues for this puzzle. The meta answer is a two-word phrase made up of what the first words of those clues should have been. intriguing! what’s going on?

well, for starters, it’s only a 9×9 grid. the second thing i noticed about it is that i found the 9×9 crossword very difficult to complete. in addition to the two missing clues we were warned about in the instructions, there was just a whole lot of stuff i didn’t know. eventually i did piece it together, but that solving time i posted is slower that any of the 15x15s i do weekly with the exception of the newsday saturday stumper; in fact, it’s slower than several of the 21x21s i did last week.

what about the fill and clues? nothing jumped out at me from the fill—it seems like a normal crossword. there are two 9s spanning the grid across and a couple of 8s down; nothing about any of them particularly seemed thematic. the clues, however, did strike me as unusual. almost all of them are quite long, and when i looked closer at their first words (since the instructions suggested that they might be involved in the meta mechanism), i also noticed that almost all of them start with a 4-letter word. that can’t be coincidence, right? since it’s such a small puzzle, i’ll paste all the clues here:

• {Expo presentation for the inventor Herminie Cadolle in 1889} BRA. i did not know this fact.
• {Faux fruit source in some plants} ARIL.
• {-} EAVE. one of the missing clues.
• {Area with lots of ore} LODE.
• {Over the moon} AGOG.
• {Walk heavily} PLOD.
• {Set off one’s BS meter} RUNG FALSE.
• {[Rest assured, *I* would never make this mistake]} SIC.
• {Treescape openings} CLEARINGS. this clue took me an embarrassingly long time, mostly because i didn’t know the word “treescape” and was distracted by the existence of spyscape, a … magazine? museum? about … uh, spying? that i know has a crossword edited by will nediger. so reading this clue made me think of, like, job openings at a similarly-named institution devoted to trees instead of spies. not my finest hour as a solver, i admit.
• {Sled surface} HILL.
• {Gene ___ Jessen (pioneering aviator whose books include “Amelia Was Right” and “Sky Girls”)} NORA. never heard of this author/aviator.
• {Aria performer at the beginning of “Lohengrin”} ELSA.
• {Evil ___ (sign of bad things to come)} OMEN.
• {-} EYED. the other missing clue.
• {Avid fan’s feeling upon meeting their idol, maybe} AWE.
• {___ trap (hunter’s device)} BEAR.
• {Wine is used in its “bolognese” type} RAGU.
• {Bard of ___ (Shakespeare nickname)} AVON.
• {Kate Mara co-star in 2025’s “Easy’s Waltz”} AL PACINO. did not know this film.
• {“Warcraft: The Board Game” action} ROLL.
• {Vows exchanged at the altar} I DOS.
• {Part of an article that might be buried} LEDE.
• {Oven baking is substituted for hard boiling in a TikTok hack for making it} EGG SALAD.
• {Pine relative} FIR.
• {Luau cheer ___ hoo (the answer is hidden in this clue)} CHEE. didn’t know this either, and off of _HE_ i tried… THEA. welp.
• {Vegetable source in Chinese cuisine} LILY. would never have gotten this clue in a million years, and honestly i still don’t even understand it.
• {Lisp : cond :: lambda calculus : ifThen___} ELSE.
• {Rene Redzepi’s restaurant} NOMA.
• {Deepened} GREW.
• {Per the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, having “the realism required for psychic survival”} SANE.

as you can see, almost every clue starts with a four-letter word. the exceptions are set, treescape, warcraft, vegetable, deepened, and per. this can’t be purely accidental, especially because several of the clues seem like they were written in such as way as to force the first word, like “wine” in the RAGU clue, “avid” in the AWE clue, and “oven” in the EGG SALAD clue.

in fact, taking a look at those clues again—the clue first words that aren’t four letters are two 3s, two 8s, and two 9s. the grid also has two 8s and two 9s, and a whole bunch of 4s. the title of the puzzle is “free refill”. can it actually be that we’re supposed to refill the entire grid using this set of words? … ???!?!!!!

this is the point when my jaw just about hit the floor. the grid contains 30 entries: four 3s, twenty-two 4s, two 8s and two 9s. the first letters of the 28 clues (remember, two entries are unclued) comprise two 3s, twenty-two 4s, two 8s and two 9s. that’s a perfect match, if the two missing clues both start with 3-letter words. with growing excitement, i realized that you can put TREESCAPE and VEGETABLE at 13- and 16-across and they intersect perfectly with WARCRAFT and DEEPENED at 4- and 9-down, with PER and SET meeting in the middle. we’re absolutely doing this.

it really didn’t take long to assemble the grid—VOWS goes right in off the V in VEGETABLE, as it’s the only answer starting with V. similarly, GENE and BARD are the only G and B and must come down from VEGETABLE as well. FAUX is the only F, so it must come off WARCRAFT, and EXPO has to cross that at the only X. after that, the rest went in pretty easily; the result is at right. it was really quite fun to assemble, almost more like doing a jigsaw puzzle than a crossword puzzle.

as you can see, the two missing 3s are at 1- and 27-across, and they form the two-word phrase POP DUO, which is the answer to the meta.

the fact that these are ostensibly the first words of clues for EAVE and EYED gave me some pause. that doesn’t seem easy to pull off at all, and perhaps that’s why will “forgot” to write those clues. on the other hand, this is a pretty darn good final answer—a pair of symmetric 3s that forms a real phrase, and it ties into the fact that the crossword was really a pair of crosswords (!!!) and then the final answer popped right off the page/screen.

it’s not logically part of the meta, so we really are done, but did anybody come up with good ideas for those missing clues? the best i could do was {Pop-___ goldfish (Animal Crossing fish)} for EYED and {Duo might hang out in this part of a house} for EAVE.

anyway, i can’t say enough about how amazing this puzzle is. to even think of the idea is outlandish, and then to actually pull it off in such a way that it’s actually solvable is nothing short of wizardry. i can’t even really wrap my head around how you would go about constructing this puzzle—as we’ve just seen, it can be very, very hard to force a particular word at the start of a given clue. to do it for 28 of the 30 clues in a puzzle is mind-boggling. this is the kind of construction that makes you wonder if we’re all living in a simulation created by will in which he can just bend reality to his whim.

that’s all for me this week. if you did come up with any good clue ideas for EAVE and EYED, let’s hear them in the comments!