Surprise! I’m breaking my “new puzzle every other Saturday” rule by publishing on an off-week, and also on a Friday. I wrote the New York Times puzzle for tomorrow, so I figured, why not have two? My schedule will get back to normal beginning next week — meaning, there will be a new puzzle on March 1, then on March 15, and so on.

Today’s puzzle is a metapuzzle. If you’ve never solved a metapuzzle before, here’s how it works: you solve the crossword as you normally would, and when you’re done, you have to find a specific word or phrase which fits a pattern hidden in the puzzle. For example, if the longest entries in a puzzle hid the words SIGHT, SMELL, SOUND, and TASTE inside them, then the answer to the meta would probably be TOUCH.  It’s basically a puzzle within a puzzle. Matt Gaffney is a master at creating these things, and he runs a weekly meta contest which you should definitely check out. Matt has also written a good primer on how to solve metapuzzles which you can read here.

And if you’d like some extra meta contest goodness, check out fellow indie puzzler Neville Fogarty’s offering here.

So that’s that. Oh, and I’m tossing in a prize, too. One randomly selected winner will receive a Devil Cross t-shirt…..which I haven’t designed yet. But it’ll be cool! And in the right size. Because a life goal of mine is to put my website on your chest.

The answer to this contest puzzle is a bygone TV show which has since been adapted to the big screen. Please submit your answer to me (devilcrosswords@gmail.com) by 6 pm on Friday, February 28. Only one answer per entrant, please — so make sure you’ve got it right before hitting “Send.”

Enjoy!