Here's the solution grid to Part I of the contest:
If you want to watch me make this puzzle, the video is at https://tinyurl.com/TJOP-allenscrew.
The winning entry out of 6 in Part II of the contest is this one by Neville Fogarty, the only one that was easy enough that I was able to solve it without looking anything up. I guess pandering to people works sometimes. :) I was hoping to receive a few entries that partitioned the grid in interesting ways, such as my WW220 (mega spoiler alert!), but in the absence of that, I had to judge the puzzles purely by how fun they were to solve. Neville, who apparently did not rely on a test-solver, wins the grand prize! You might want a PDF version of the puzzle to print and solve.
1 Witch's transportation / Crop up
2 Defeat handily / Travel without a fixed destination
3 Go after a fly / Winnie-the-Pooh character named after a donkey's bray
4 Air-blasting device / Au courant
5 Make good on, as a debt / Orchard plants
6 Right, on many maps / Wintry spike
7 One of two of Disney's Seven Dwarfs whose name doesn't end with a "y" / Herb in Italian cuisine
8 Undead being / Hooligan
9 More orderly / At any time
10 Omnishambles / A one-digit square number
PENTOMINOES:
* HALF OF THE FINAL ANSWER
* THE OTHER HALF OF THE FINAL ANSWER
* Red-capped Nintendo mascot ...
* ... and his rideable dinosaur pal
* The brightest star in Orion
* Sheep-like
* ___ Banks (coastal islands of North Carolina)
* Brass or bronze, e.g.
* Small mammal found in the title of a Shakespeare play
* Deliver a speech
* Storage space just under the roof
* Fencing swords
* Attacks with one's teeth
* Advance party's activity, in slang
* Toast, once
* One-nil, for example
* Chop off
* Gas in a layer of the stratosphere
* Gravy ingredient
* Party game akin to Werewolf, but with an organized crime theme
Three puzzles earn honorable mentions; they are authored by Carl Worth, Giovanni Pagano, and Sam Levitin. A fifth entry was just too dang hard for me, and the sixth entry had at least one region where the partition into pentominoes was ambiguous (specifically, the S's in LORDS and STOLI), breaking the rules, which is a shame because it had the interesting entry SAD SACK.
Congrats to the winners! And to all the people who constructed puzzles for this contest, keep practicing, and you might be able to get published in a magazine like Games World of Puzzles!
