February 15th, 2017, 21:01
(This post was last modified: February 15th, 2017, 21:04 by Azoth.)
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Joined: Mar 2007
Yeah, not much to say. It was a rough board for Blue. FALL was a problem not only for political clues, but also potentially for SLIP. I saw that and played conservatively in response. My clues weren't particularly inspired; I ended up being a lot busier this week than I expected, and didn't spend too much time coming up with them. In retrospect, Tennis 3 (PLAY/POINT/SERVER) and Delivery 2 (BELL/PAPER) would have been better than Tic-tac-toe and Butler. To be clear: I couldn't think of any games played on paper that kept a points tally, so I picked Tic-tac-toe because it *contradicted* many possible words: it's a mindless game (not HEAD) that you don't play in a CASINO or as part of a CLUB. The team seemed to follow my thinking, and we were set to win with Acorn 1.
I did check with pindi as to whether Tic-tac-toe would be a legal clue. On the whole, I think hyphenated words are less of an issue than making connections to the structure rather than the meaning of words (getting "Tic Tac" from Tic-tac-toe or "____ out back" from Outback), not to mention instructing spymasters as to strategy (if this is our word, give us a 1-clue). But I don't see a way of neatly avoiding it; it seems to be part of the game.
The Melania clue is hilarious. I would have understood it right away. It points to one possible winning strategy for Blue:
Nightdress 3 (SLIP/COTTON/TRUNK)
Iraq 2 (BOMB/WELL) - The way to avoid FALL is to clue narrowly. Oil wells and bombs are a better fit than, say, the FALL of Saddam.
Melania 2 (CZECH/ORANGE)
and then hope Red team blunders into HEAD. Still unlikely, but if we hadn't been gifted Canada, quite possible...
Good game, everyone.
