Wall Street Journal hints: August 9, 2014

[When you’re through with this puzzle, join us every weekend for Sunday brunch]

Some of the commenters on the Wall Street Journal puzzle blog expressed more frustration than usual with this puzzle, where not only are the clues in random order, you also have to figure out where each answer starts and ends.

It’s not as hard as it looks, and I'll give you some tactical advice here.  If that doesn’t help, there are some more specific hints in hidden text, and finally a full hint grid with the bars filled in below the fold. Don’t go for the hint grid until you try the other tips.

The first thing to know is that except for the center square, this puzzle has normal crossword symmetry. That means that if you rotate the grid 180 degrees, it will look the same.  That will help a lot with the first two rings.  Each of them has pairs of acrosses and downs that add up to 11 letters.  That means all the rows and columns are complete, and consist of one 7 and one 4 for Ring 1, and one 6 and one 5 for Ring 2.

Since the first four clues in each set are acrosses and the last four are downs, there’s only eight ways to fill each row or column if you were to go by trial and error. But you don’t have to: there’s a logical way to get started.  There’s an uncommon letter shared by an across and a down (don’t get trapped by the uncommon letter shared by two downs. Chances are good that that uncommon letter is going to be shared by those two answers, because Hex are kind constructors and want you to succeed with your logic.  Now which corner would it have to be?

Once you have that, you can use the crossword symmetry to place the bars in the opposite row and column.  You now know where another 7 and another 4 have to go, since you crossed off one across of one length and one down of the other length when you placed the words with the uncommon letter.

Now do the same thing with Ring 2.  See, it’s already easier because you have the letters from Ring 1! The remaining rings are going to be harder because the words don’t fill the entire row and column, but you have enough from the first two rings to make smart guesses.  Be willing to guess, remember the symmetry, and you will triumph!

Next hint (bigger):  click and drag in the table below if you really want to know the order of answers in the first two rings. They are presented in clockwise order, so the first letter in the table corresponds to the first across in the top row, and the last letter in the table corresponds to the first down in the left column.

Clockwise	Across		Down		Across		Down
Ring 1	c	d	e	g	a	b	h	f
Ring 2	d	b	e	g	a	c	h	f

And for emergency use only, there is a hint grid below the fold.

Hint grid for Wall Street Journal puzzle: 8/9/2014