I wrote this for a puzzle swap, and I'm somewhat proud of how it turned out. I'd like to know what you think.
T I U C R I C Z T A S R E J H U
T N A L L A G A I J U N K E T U
T E M N O I P M A H C N F G I P
Z K Q N O I T A N I R G E R E P
C U T O F F F F O R G E D Q E D
V E P M N P G N I T U O M O Z O
E S S F A L S E T H C A T E D N
T R E D H E R R I N G T M X O F
A E U X I M N U D N U O R I L E
L V D Y Z X P T E I Q Z S P U G
U A O X S A R S P D S R T Z X A
S R Q U L A I J X P U J Z Q A Y
N T G A V U Q M E C H M O H T O
I O D E R O V Z X O Q O M I E V
B I L C Z Y R E V E S Z N Y N H
N C A V A L I E R C Y G N Y N N
I've tried to minimize their existence, but words shorter than 5 letters are spurious.
The solution is a short phrase, you'll know it when you get it. Yes, there is more to this puzzle than the simple word search.
Hint:
All words fall into a small number of distinct categories.
Meta:
I want to add more tags but they are spoilery. I don't really know what I normally accepted on this site. Guidance?
Hint policy: I will be adding hints once every day.
Daily Hint #1:
Good job on solving the word search. The categories are your clues to proceed further, but you may have already guessed that. So I will say that two of the clues tell you what to do. One clue tells you how do to it. And the final clue tells you what to use it on.
Daily Hint #2:
I checked Wikipedia, and it looks like there are 18 quadrillion different Knight tours possible on an 8x8 board. So even if there was some hint telling you where to start (X marks the spot was clever, and I wish I had thought of that), I'd have to also specify where you go next approx 54 more times. Clearly, I'm not doing that, so how can I tell you which tour to use only using one of the hints?
Daily Hint #2.5 (Bonus):
The relevant hint is the group meaning "separated" or "disconnected." How can a knight's tour be separated from itself?
Daily Hint #3:
The actual root words for each of the four groups are "knight", "fake", "tour", and "uncrossed"