If you check out the PR (casual and word) from 2018, there was a similar step in Scrabble puzzle. It was definitely put intentionally.

Thanks for all the feedback - positive as well as negative. I hope I have responded to most of them. Thanks to all 156 participants and Congratulations to the 13 finishers and others who were very close to finishing the set. Good performances from the usual suspects from India, but the scores could have been better. Nice to see some good performances by pranavmanu, avni and Jash in this test!

The objective in this test was to have (a) variety of puzzles (b) avoid picture/visual/counting puzzles as they may not be appropriate for an online test, (c) smaller grids in general. Most of the variants were same as last year. Word Stairs (which has appeared in a 2012 test by Nikola) was the new variant in Word section. But there was a change in the rule with respect to overlapping of letters. In Casual, Almost chess was a risky new addition, as the solving approach was generally tedious. Other changes were compass and pyramid climbers which were gentle puzzles.

Casual: Almost Chess had 4x4 and 5x5 sizes and with an intended start provided for each puzzle (0 and 4 in the 1st, 0 in 2nd and 5 in the 3rd). Curve data grid size was also small and the starts were generally in the corner cells. The third one was slightly larger but easily solvable. Many participants would have worked these out intuitively too as solving tweaks can be done in such puzzles later. Shortest distances was easier than last year with only 10 nodes and probably one extra clue. Letter weights had most of the the top scorer names from last year's PR test. The approach has been discussed already earlier in this thread. Compass needed an approach which could identify corner cells with different regions.

Word: The scrabble was effectively a 3 row puzzle. Letter scrabble -1 was about fitting all the small words in a limited space and Letter Scrabble - 2 was a little exercise with some starts given due to the placement of multiple As and Us, and containing names of some of the top sportswomen from India as clues. The last step was about fitting SMRITI which did not have an A or U. Meandering words were small grids with some simple tricks. Some participants missed the instructions and solved without knowing that the first letters were given. Word stairs turned out to be trickier than expected, and fairly error-prone too. The smaller one had 24 letters to be filled out of 25 grid cells and counting could also be used as one of the inputs while solving. The bigger one had some world dance forms as clues and the starts for JIVE, SWING, TAP and WALTZ were given partially. It was mostly about carefully avoiding repetition of letter A and solving.

The next PR test will be by Ashish and will surely be a good quality test.

Solution Booklet (including detailed steps for Almost Chess puzzles): http://logicmastersindia.com/lmitests/dl.asp?attachmentid=774