(Note: the backstory here may or may not be entirely fictitious.)
The fortnightly chess theme is finally over! I couldn't stand it. It was chaos! Pieces moving around in all the wrong ways... I was so angry that I made metapuzzles purely to tell everyone how much I hated it. Unfortunately, the message got lost when I started working on puzzles, and now I can't remember what it was! The metas rearranged themselves roughly in order from easiest to hardest, and to make things worse, when I spilled water on my speakers all of the flavortexts fell to the bottom of the post. (Yes, that's exactly how computers work.) Can you all help me figure out what I was trying to say?
Background: A metapuzzle (or meta) is a puzzle that combines words or phrases from other puzzles into a new word or phrase. For an example, see my previous meta. Flavortext is text that goes at the top of a puzzle, obliquely hinting at what to do.
Once you get the answers, the cryptic clues themselves are not necessary to solve the metas, but they may be very useful in one case. One meta is incorrectly ordered. Numbers for each meta are for your convenience only and are unnecessary. Metas are ordered roughly in order of difficulty.
Meta 1
- Lets current flow great with vents (13)
- Crab researcher heard Chevy steal to name a few - every, uh, concept (13)
- Basketball game and insect make transportation (5, 3, 5)
- Untangled, sore, mutilated doctor (6, 7)
- Circle bear, backing up (4)
- Odd scampi are sticky substance (3)
- Small-town boy (6)
- Six directions with a messy "DIE"? That's something that attracts suspicion (9)
- Building for bird with no tail (5)
- Udon or sake veiled contributors (6)
- Fabric is only money put the other way around (8)
- Make note (2)
(full name)
Meta 2
- That breath grabs by the ear, making students (9)
- Everyone in greeting held captive by short stomach element (8)
- Journey for particles leads to issues (9)
- Trip in bar room (5)
- Works of parties (6)
- Small entrances to functions (4)
- Orb taken back in HAL Laboratory (4)
- Divide lodge (7)
Meta 3
- One surrounded by trunk makes sound (5)
- Taking directions to road by end is smart (5)
- One Direction member sounds like flower? (4)
- Circle back to reservoir (4)
- Mathematician's snake (5)
- Burning bush - other kept secret (3)
- Approach dye mostly for a joke (6)
- Ship with no walls: a tale of the past (7)
Meta 4
- Saws its ash oddly in European country (5)
- Circuit element; snack element (7,4)
- City of quotes destroyed shareholders' return (4, 2, 6)
- State of recently slurred laundry basket (3, 9)
- Chief, if angered, hides game (4)
- Share chirp again (7)
- Snare damaged voice actor from my other meta (5)
Meta 5
- Wheel made up of hard wood (4)
- Is Capone able to channel? (5)
- Gore inside kingdom? Clean up (7) (replaced erroneous clue)
- Worry about automotive's emissions at first (4)
- Sunshine following Ben makes a shout for joy (6)
- Calipers wrongly described reproductions (8)
- Ambassador Ichigo conceals column of a sort (5)
- French programming style is easily broken (7)
- Notice no redhead shrinking (6)
Meta 6
- Broken Gene, TV goer, earned something in return (3, 7)
- Chlorine sea creature is a mess maker (7)
- Flab lacks horrible "Plan B's", maybe (4-5)
- Misses: "Eastern" cover is Spanish (6)
- Sending away, staring (8, 3)
- Take for granted panhandle, perhaps (3)
- Those that warn pet hiding you and some charges (8)
- Wet bean contains pages (5)
- What pesky whipper-snappers do online: stop freaking out (4)
Misc.
Anyone up for a game of cards?
Chess.com made me look like an idiot, but I became much more studious with the help of Wikipedia.
Getting around is harder than you'd think. You always get confused and make a mistake.
Let's pair up to be more safe. Here, you go first.
My unique old consorts, when pressed, will tell you how to talk to me.
My partner loves to usurp the throne.
Sometimes I feel like I can only see one side of things.
Oh, and I found this weird drawing in my notebook, although something tells me that there's something wrong with it. Next to it was the word "SPAN" and a rightwards arrow.
2:
There is no wordplay involved in this meta: what the answers represent is associated with something else.
5:
It seems like something happened to these words. What could they have been originally, and how could they have been changed?
6:
Someone has already noticed something weird about this one.
Metameta:
The grid still doesn't seem right to me. How could we fix it?
Answer
I'm still curious about this puzzle, so here are a couple more of the clues I think might be right but haven't been solved thus far.
Meta 2
Works of parties (6)
Labors (double definition, works=labors, parties=Labors)
Small entraces to functions (4)
Sins (S + ins = sine functions) ?
Trip in bar room (5)
From Volatility: Space (triple definition, space out/space bar/physical space)
Meta 5
- Notice no redhead shrinking (6)
Waning ("notice"=warning, "no redhead"=subtract r, def: shrinking)
Meta 6
- Sending away, staring (8,3)
Perhaps:
Pointing out (double definition)
Second try: Checking out (double definition)
Meta 2 Answer
Big thanks to @feelinferrety and @LeppyR64 for help!
The answers to Meta 2 (mostly from @feelinferrety) are:
Disciples
Thallium
Questions
Space
Labors
Sins
Ball
Quarter
And it seems that each of these can be
associated with a number.
Giving us
12 Disciples of Jesus
Thallium is element 81
20 Questions, the game
Literally, a space 12 Labors of Hercules
7 deadly Sins
8 Ball, the pool game or9-ball
Quarter is 25 centsor 4 to make a whole?
We need the flavortext
My unique old consorts, when pressed, will tell you how to talk to me.
There's a clue hidden MadGab-style in this flavortext
"unique old" = unicode, which hints that we need unicode characters.
Combining that with "when pressed", we press the sets of numbers giving: 128120 and 127825.
Then we look up the unicode characters with those HTML entity codes:
👸 PRINCESS and 🍑 PEACH
Leaving the final answer to Meta 2:
PRINCESS PEACH
As f'' pointed out, you can use the paths drawn on the notebook paper to
fill a chess board. And since each clue is the same length as one of the chess pieces' paths, you can fill in the 8x8 board with the answers to the 6 metas as follows:
We can be confident in this orientation because of the "SPAN →" clue which matches the upper right of this board.And though there are two paths of length 9, we know that MALAYSIAN goes with the knight's path, since that meta was based on Arthurian Knights.
Then, we use the remaining flavortext "Chess.com made me look like an idiot, but I became much more studious with the help of Wikipedia." This refers to
Two common quick checkmates, the Fool's Mate ("idiot") and the Scholar's Mate ("studious").
If we play out those scenarios,
and take the landing square of each piece in succession, we get:
So CHEC from the Fool's Mate game.
and
KPLEASE from the Scholar's Mate game.
Leaving us with (in retrospect, of course)
Check, please.
I'm glad there was a pun at the end of the rainbow.
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