Puzzle Notes

Dear Friends:

Thank you so much to those of you who submitted responses to last week's trivia puzzle. We have a new one for you this week, but before we talk about it, we want to congratulate Nora on being the randomly selected All-Questions-Correct-Answer-Getter (trademark pending) from last week's puzzle! If you pop on over to the AVCX Trivia Twitter account, you should see a little tribute to the winner sometime this weekend. And now, on to this week's puzzle!

This week we have a whopping 5/5 difficulty super-sized trivia puzzle for you, made by Adam Wagner. We really love this puzzle because--in addition to just being full of some great trivia--it also illustrates how fun and flexible this format is. Because this is a super-sized puzzle, and also because the AVCXpansion is taking a little break next week, we are going to give you *two* weeks to solve this one. So send in your answers by March 18th and we'll choose one person with all correct answers to be featured on our Twitter.

Now, before you click on the beautifully-programmed button below to go to the Google form, we did want to take a moment to talk about some feedback/questions we received from solvers last week. One big piece of feedback was that some people did not want to participate in the competition, and instead wanted to have the answers included on the last page of the puzzle pdf like what we had the first week. We heard you, and so this week we have included the solutions in the pdfs. However, we realize that including the solutions at the same time we email out the questions can confuse some of the rules around the competition, so we will state them plainly here as well as on the bottom of the Google form:

If you plan on submitting a solution to these puzzles as an entry in the weekly competition, we ask that you do not look up answers beforehand. We realize this wasn't made clear last week, so no worries if did do some Googling, but going forward, the answers to these questions must be pulled purely from your brains. Do not look at the solutions in the pdf, do not look up answers online, do not search through your texting history because you are *certain* you talked about this exact thing with your cousin last April and just want to confirm spelling. Any sort of answer-looking-up from here on out constitutes cheating and even though we have absolutely no way to confirm whether or not you're being honest in your process, we are trusting you to realize that breaking the honor code is absolutely not worth the ~1/350 chance that a Twitter account with not even 150 followers will change its profile picture to an image of your choosing for seven days. So please don't look things up. It's not worth it.

That being said, we have absolutely no problem with a small set of people solving these questions together. We will leave it as an exercise to the reader what constitutes "small," but ultimately with this game we are optimizing for fun, and if solving the weekly puzzles with a spouse or your siblings or your pub trivia team makes this game more fun for you, then that's the way we want you to play. We only ask that you submit no more than one solution per team so as not to stack the odds in your favor.

And now, with no further ado, here is this week's AVCX trivia puzzle, by Adam Wagner! See you again in two weeks!

Happy trivia-ing,

Aimee & the expanded AVCX crew

avxwords.com | @avcxword | @lilavcx | @avcxplus | @avcxtrivia

P.S. If you like these puzzles and and think you can make some of your own, email your idea to trivia@avxwords.com. We look forward to hearing from you!