Crossword Help, Clues & AnswersStruggling to get that one last answer to a perplexing clue? We can help you solve those tricky clues in your crossword puzzle. ✍ Refine the search results by specifying the number of letters. If certain letters are known already, you can provide them in the form of a pattern: d?f???ul? (Use ? for unknown letters). We have found 1 Answer (s) for the Clue „*Online card game with over 100 million players“. Try to find some letters, so you can find your solution more easily. If you've got another answer, it would be kind of you to add it to our crossword dictionary. Online card game with over 100 million players / WED 6-2-21 / Historic inn commemorated during Pride MONTH as suggested by this puzzle's border answers / 1989 play about CapoteConstructor: Jesse Goldberg Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (more like an Easy Thursday, just because of the theme type) THEME: STONEWALL (34A: Historic inn commemorated during Pride Month, as suggested by this puzzle's border answers) — all the answers on the edges of the grid (so, forming a kind of WALL around the grid) are types of STONEs (you must mentally supply STONE to make them work): Theme answers:
Word of the Day: HEARTH(STONE) (1D) —
• • • Hello! It's Pride Monthand today we get the first of what I hope will be many Pride-related puzzles. The theme worked well for me, as I went from ??? to "oh, there are two STONE answers in the (NW) corner, so ... CORNER + STONE = cornerstone, I get it" to "wait, but BIRTHstone is not in the corner, what is happening?" until I eventually stumbled into the revealer, where all was made clear and the Aha was genuine. The only "stone" I had trouble with was HEARTHSTONE, which I've never heard of and let me tell you, I won't be alone here. I don't love the gaming clue on this answer, and not just because I've never heard of it. If you actually read this blog, you'll know I don't know things practically every day. It is a rare puzzle that is full of only things I know. I am used to encountering things I don't know regularly, and the vast, vast majority of those I just chalk up to normal human ignorance (in this case, mine), and I move along. But *some* answers I don't know irk me either because they seem genuinely obscure or because they are extremely niche, and even then I'm usually only truly irked if the thing I didn't know ends up feeling like a boring thing that's not really worth knowing. How is my life improved by learning about one of seemingly infinite gaming properties? HEARTHSTONE is some combo of niche and I-don't-care forgettable. If a clue has to tell you how popular its answer is ("no, seriously, 100 million people play this thing! The company that makes the game said so!") then that's a tell. The clue knows that a huge chunk of solvers are going to have no idea what it's talking about. And in this case ... what it's talking about is a subset of the Warcraft universe, and not (by a longshot) the most popular subset: that would be World of Warcraft, which is massively popular, and which I've actually seen in puzzles (abbr. WoW). But HEARTHSTONE? I'm going to forget HEARTHSTONE exists as soon as I'm done typing this. I think the clue is an attempt to make the puzzle a little more contemporary, to give it a little more Now energy (the grid is otherwise heavily laden with olden fill). But there's gotta be a better way than this. "Look, fellow youths! Gaming!" This was a sore-thumb / outlier clue, turning an ordinary word into a niche proper noun in what feels like a desperate attempt to include something "youthful." Is this mere opinion on my part? Well, yes. Hi. What did you think was happening here? Anyway: I was able to work around HEARTHSTONE easily enough, so whatever, I guess. If you're going to teach me something new, just make it interesting, I beg of thee. The fill was olden, as I say (feels like ages since I've seen ONEL and TRU, which used to roam the grids of the late 20th-century in great numbers), but I can forgive the crusty short stuff today because we are dealing with a highly restrictive theme (all around the edges *and* in the middle with the revealer). The IVIES should've changed their name as soon as they added a fifth U. to their number. By rights, they should now be called the VIIIies (pronounce it how you will!). Not much to highlight or complain about today. The theme is pretty much the thing. I would really love it if I never saw DTS again. This is largely how I feel about the puzzle's whole alcoholic-mocking vocabulary (WINO! SOT! HIC!). DTS (delirium tremens) is the flip side of mockery—but it's still gawker-y, and it's crosswordese to boot, so why not just make it DES Moines and EASE here today and spare us the spectacle of the suffering alcoholic? I don't get it. I also don't get why you'd put RNC in anything, since they're essentially a white supremacist terrorist group now, but there's not as easy a fix there, as that corner was under a lot of theme pressure (CRAT, OAS ... RNC is merely the worst part of a very rough patch there). Let's end with something fun. EROSION! No, wait, that's depressing. The ALAMO!? No, still not fun. Oh, ERIC hiding inside "Am erica," that's kinda cute (15A: Man found in America?). Let's wave at ERIC. Hi ERIC. We see you there. The theme was fun! The rest ... was the rest. Not great, but it was easy, so it never genuinely detracted from the theme, which is a winner. Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld |