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Art of the game.such.fame!

by Holly Sipek

Answer:
CHICAGO WHITE SOX

We notice that the given images are all relatively well-known public artistic or architectural monuments and landmarks. We find that the first step is to identify these landmarks by their location on what3words.com, a geocoding system that identifies map locations on Earth with 3 unique words. Two of the words are given next to its image. The third word can be found by locating and clicking around the landmark itself in satellite view on what3words.com.
Number Landmark Missing word
1 Faisalabad Clock Tower DIPLOMAS
2 Trevi Fountain FANCIED
3 The Big Pineapple FORGIVE
4 Seven Magic Mountains GLITZIEST
5 Prague Astronomical Clock KEYBOARD
6 The Monolith at Vigeland Park QUIETLY
7 Endless Staircase (Umschreibung) RITUAL
8 Sun Voyager SURVEY
9 Merlion TRUNK
10 Astor Place Cube (Alamo) VALUES
These missing words fill in blanks in the puzzle grids below, clued by the number in <angle brackets>. The clues in the grids are all regular expressions. Once the missing words are filled in to their corresponding blanks, each of the grids has a unique solution such that the letter or number in each square matches both the horizontal and vertical clue expressions.

Reading across we notice that are also geocodes in another grid system. Noting that they all begin with C, D, or E followed by M or N may help in finding the right one, as may the alternating pattern of letter pairs and number pairs. The title of the puzzle also offers a clue – the What3Words location of “game.such.fame” is the center of Maidenhead, England pointing to the use of Maidenhead grid squares. The squares in the solution are largely located in the western United States. Using a website such as karhukoti.com/maidenhead-grid-square-locator or k7fry.com/grid lets us easily view the area described by each location in satellite view. Each location has a single man-made letter (some more obvious than others) within the square – a “hillside letter" or “mountain monogram”. Taken in order, the letters spell the clue phrase “MLB TEAM / THAT PLAYS IN / EN SIX ONE ET”. One more Maidenhead grid square lookup reveals that EN61ET includes Guaranteed Rate Field, the home of the CHICAGO WHITE SOX.

Authors' Notes

I’ve never lived, or even spent a lot of time, in the American West. I had no idea that the western half of the country developed a penchant for building giant letters into the sides of local mountains or hills. But a fortuitous Google search for “hill words” (whose letters are in alphabetical order to a point, then in reverse alphabetical order) led me instead to Wikipedia’s page of “hillside letters.” Once I knew about this phenomenon, I decided everyone else needed to discover them as well. Credit to my husband’s ham radio hobby for the idea of Maidenhead grid squares, and credit to regex crosswords for being memorably fun in 2013.