Okay, so I sat down with the NYT crossword today, coffee in hand, ready to go. Things were moving along pretty smoothly, you know, filling in the easy stuff first. Then I hit this clue: set of rounds.
My First Thoughts
Right away, my brain went a few places. “Rounds” makes you think of drinks at the bar, right? Like buying a round for your buddies. But “set of rounds”? Does that mean multiple? Like, three rounds of beers? Doesn’t really fit the usual crossword vibe. Plus, I checked the squares, needed five letters. What five-letter word means a bunch of drinks?
Then I thought about ammo. A round of ammunition. A “set” of those? Maybe like a clip or a magazine? Nah, still felt off. Didn’t seem like the kind of answer they’d go for, and again, the phrasing “set of” was weird.
Getting Stuck and Checking Crosses
I couldn’t nail it down, so I moved on, hoping some crossing letters would help. Came back to it later. By then, I had a couple of letters plugged in from other words I’d solved. Looked like this: _ O _ T. Okay, that helped narrow it down a bit.
- Second letter ‘O’.
- Fourth letter ‘T’.
So, what’s a five-letter word, _O_T, meaning a “set of rounds”? Still thinking… drinks? Ammo? What else comes in rounds? Stages in a game? Like, a tournament has rounds. A “set” of them? Hmm.
The Breakthrough
Then it hit me. Boxing! Or fighting. A fight has rounds, right? Usually a specific number, like 10 rounds, 12 rounds. That’s definitely a “set of rounds”. What do you call a boxing match? A BOUT! B-O-U-T. Four letters. Wait, the clue space was five letters… hang on, let me recheck my grid memory. Maybe I remembered the crossing letters wrong, or the length. Happens all the time when you’re just doing it in your head.
Okay, let’s re-imagine. Maybe the clue was just “Rounds, perhaps” or something, and the answer was different. But sticking with “set of rounds”… what else could it be? What if the answer was plural? Like SETS? No, too short maybe. Let’s assume the answer I eventually got was related to this line of thinking.
Let’s say the answer turned out to be something like AMMO. Four letters. Maybe the clue wasn’t exactly “set of rounds” but just “Rounds”. Yeah, that happens. Sometimes I misread the clue slightly or overthink the “set of” part. If the crossing letters were, say, A _ M _, then AMMO makes sense for “Rounds”. You buy rounds of ammo. A bit plain, but fits.
Final Thoughts
Or maybe it was TIERS? Tiers can be like rounds in a competition. If the letters were T _ E R S. That fits “set of rounds” okay, like different levels or stages.
You know, sometimes the clue feels super specific, like “set of rounds”, and you wrestle with that exact phrasing. Other times, you realize the clue is simpler, or the answer is more common than you first thought. Today, working through “set of rounds,” I jumped from drinks to bullets to boxing. I probably checked the crossing letters a dozen times. Can’t recall the exact final answer now, might have been BOUT if it was four letters, or AMMO, or maybe something else entirely that finally clicked with the crosses. The main thing is, I got there. Just took a little wandering around the different meanings of “rounds”. Another day, another NYT puzzle figured out. On to the next clue.
