Puzzle #252: The World's Most Cornery Crossword

I actually have no idea what the world's most cornery crossword is. But this themeless (pdf, puz, pdf solution) is definitely cornerier than the average puzzle. Thanks to Ada for test-solving!

Constructed by Will Nediger with the crossword puzzle builder from Amuse Labs

Puzzle #251: It's Kind of Like Raspberry Ripple

New themed puzzle for you this week (pdf, puz, pdf solution)! Asymmetrical, as my puzzles are wont to be these days.

Made by Will Nediger using the online crossword builder from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights: Lollapuzzoola edition

This year's Lollapuzzoola featured a thoroughly excellent set of puzzles, so this special edition of indie puzzle highlights will cover three of them: Shady Characters by Brooke Husic, Express Finals by Malaika Handa, and Literary Creatures by Brian Cimmet. (There are no real spoilers in the writeup of Literary Creatures, though, so feel free to read even if you're still working on that one.)

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Shady Characters (Brooke Husic)

Writing the hard themed puzzle for a tournament (akin to the ACPT's Puzzle 5) is a particularly demanding assignment: you've gotta come up with a gimmick devious enough to slow down the top solvers, while also fair enough to give the rest of the solvers a fighting chance at finishing it in the time limit. And it's particular hard to come up with a truly original gimmick, one that hasn't been used a dozen times before. Brooke is particularly good at this latter challenge - her puzzle for the online edition of Lolla has become legendary, but her April Fools' puzzles for Puzzmo are great examples too.

The revealer of this puzzle is CALL BULL, clued as [Challenge as untrue ... and what you should, appropriately, do when you see red]. As hinted at very cleverly by the title, clues with the string "red" contain a lie, typically meaning the opposite of what they actually should mean. 1-Across, for example, is clued as [Hatred], but the answer is FONDNESS. There have been lots of puzzles in which clues need to be changed in order to be interpreted properly, but these usually involve letters being added to or deleted from the clues; I don't know that I've ever seen a puzzle that asks you to change the clues semantically like this.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that "red" is a very common string that doesn't stand out at all, so it's easy to miss, and the fact that Brooke ensured that each clue had a plausible answer, on the literal reading, with the same length as the actual answer. (So [Predominant U.S. language] clued SWAHILI, which is the same length as ENGLISH, and [Hundredth of a dollar] clued DIME, which is the same length as CENT.)

The other thing I like to see in a puzzle like this is crunchy cluing outside of the theme, so that the solve is still challenging even once you've cracked the gimmick. Here, Brooke's characteristic tricky cluing shines through in clues like [Curbed appeal?] for PLS, [Mole or slug] for UNIT, [Matter of record?] for VINYL, and [Head of cabbage?] for CFO.

Express Finals (Malaika Handa)

Writing the finals for a tournament is a similar challenge to writing the hard themed puzzle, especially for a tournament like Lolla that has more than one difficulty division, in which case the grid has to be flexible enough for the puzzle to be easy or very hard, depending on the clues. The harder version of this puzzle has a wildly impressive density of tricky wordplay clues, and an equally impressive hit rate with them. A lot of them announce themselves with question marks - [Hardly working class?] for EASY A, [Core memory component] for BYTE, [Took an enthusiastic approach?] for RAN UP, [Board present at a corporate event?] for CHARCUTERIE, [Professional script writers, for short?] for DOCS, etc. - but many others sneak up on you. [Target of much paper coverage] for ROCK, [Way of getting something off one's chest] for TOP SURGERY, and [It can indicate something's X factor] for DECA- are particularly great examples.

But I also appreciate that other approaches to trickiness are well represented, too. [It's used in cooking and skin care] for COCONUT OIL is a nice example of a clue that makes you search through your mental Rolodex for products that fit the bill. And the pairing of [Possessive that becomes another possessive if you add a letter] for OUR and, nearby, [Pronoun that becomes another pronoun if you add a letter] makes the choice of that particular cluing strategy feel more intentional and thoughtful than some such clues, which often feel like they add difficulty purely via vagueness. (Those are, I suppose, also "mental Rolodex" clues, but they often have a search space that's too large to be useful, which is definitely not the case with possessives and pronouns.)

Literary Creatures (Brian Cimmet)

I failed to successfully past the first step of Brian's three-step meta suite, but even that first step was enough to seriously wow me. This is a variety suite that's firing on all cylinders, from the sheer amount of variety in puzzle types (including Masyu and Sudoku-style logic puzzles and a whole bunch of different kinds of word puzzles), to the delightful narrative premise (you're a parent whose kid has presented you with a series of puzzles to figure out what book you need to read for their bedtime routine), to the way that the answers tie together thematically with the narrative and the flavortext of the story plays a key role in cracking the meta answers. The sheer scope of this is daunting and it'd take paragraphs to go through the individual puzzles that I enjoyed, so I'll leave it that, but this is highly recommended - if you bought the Lolla puzzles just for the crosswords, you should check this out too.

Puzzle #250: Freestyle 20

It feels like it's been a while since I've had a themeless here, so here's one (pdf, puz, pdf solution) - Sunday-sized and asymmetrical, in case that's your thing. Thanks to Frisco and Noah for test-solving!

Made by Will Nediger using the free crossword puzzle maker from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

July 25: themeless no. 36 (crosstina aquafina & erik agard, crosstina aquafina)

July 29: the symphony series: movement twenty-seven (owen bergstein, Dissonant Grids)

July 31: Extra Toppings (bob weisz, Puzzmo)

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themeless no. 36 (crosstina aquafina & erik agard)

This puzzle marks the return of the greatest byline yet discovered (their last blog collaboration won an Orca for puzzle of the year, and with good reason). Obviously, if you take two great constructors and combine them, you're probably going to get a great puzzle, but this particular byline is a very specific pairing of sensibilities that works like gangbusters. I associate Kelsey with wonderfully wordy-yet-precise, often autobiographically inspired, references in the clues - things like [make a last-minute, winning ebay bid on a vintage 90s nike charles barkley 1993 mvp single-stitch t-shirt, for example] for SNIPE or [fandom creation that might have a "felonious gru/minions", "bisexual mary magdalene", or "reichenbach falls coffeeshop au" tag] for FIC. And I associate Erik with wonderfully terse, creative wordplay clues - things like [prince fandom?] for SATAN WORSHIP or [defeat on points?] for OUTARGUE. (I have no idea who wrote those specific clues, of course - especially since I find that, when I collaborate, I tend to accommodate my style to that of the person I'm collabing with.)

The 1-Across clue is a perfect illustration of how beautifully those two sensibilities are married in this puzzle. [STOP! ..... hammer type] for BALL-PEEN both has the zaniness that I associate with Kelsey's byline and the ear for wordplay that associate with Erik's. I also like that there are clues with disguised capital letters that would only work in the all-lowercase house style of Crosstina Aquafina: [someone who's unmatched on bumble?] for OAF and [where u at?] for CAMPUS. And I like that ALLITERATIVE (clued as [like big bags bussin' out the bentley bentayga]) is stacked on two entries that are (quasi-)rhyming, the exact counterpart of alliteration (DIVINE NINE and TEXT NECK). I guess this writeup has just devolved into listing various things I like about this puzzle, so I'll also mention the colorfulness of the long fill: TWO CHEEKS OF THE SAME ASS, YOU HAD ONE JOB, A WORLD Of HURT, UNFUCKWITHABLE, I PLEAD THE FIFTH. Anyway, all this is to say that this might be the puzzle of the year so far, and I wouldn't be surprised if Kelsey and Erik repeat at the Orcas next year.

the symphony series: movement twenty-seven (owen bergstein)

Last month, Dissonant Grids featured the "symphony series," in which Owen Bergstein posted a puzzle a day for 31 days. The series is framed as a sort of cruciverbal symphony, though that analogy didn't really ring true for me. A symphony, at least on the classical model, has a tightly-linked large-scale structure connecting its movements, whereas I had no idea what to expect from day to day in Owen's series. A more revealing comparison for me would be to something like Luciano Berio's Sequenza, a series of 14 compositions for solo instruments or voice, incorporating a wide range of extended techniques and oddities (perhaps most notoriously the moment in Sequenza V in which the soloist turns to the audience and asks "Why?"). Owen's series is similarly an exercise in experimentation, encompassing many different approaches to grid design and cluing, many of which wouldn't fly in mainstream venues.

For me, the most productive of the experiments was in movement twenty-seven, in which the cluing is extremely difficult in a deliberately unfair way, and in which the solver is forbidden from using the check or reveal functions in the applet. With vague clues like [Name that's an anagram of another] and [There are about 90 million worldwide], there's practically no way to solve this puzzle without assistance, but Owen has provided optional hints to accompany each clue. Forcing the solver to eschew check and reveal, and decide exactly which hints they want to make use of, makes the solver into an active participant in the construction (or maybe more appropriately the editing) of the puzzle, choosing which clues need to be made easier to provide footholds. You could simply use all the hints, making it into a standard easy puzzle, or you could try to strategically use as few hints as possible, or you could do anything in between. To make another analogy to the avant-garde music of the mid-20th century, I'm reminded of George Brecht's Event Scores, which push the notion of the musical score by providing brief, open-ended instructions that ordinary people can carry out in everyday life. I think there's great potential in this kind of reimagining of the relationship between the constructor and the solver, and I'm excited to see what else can be done with it.

Extra Toppings (bob weisz)

When I make themed crosswords, I have a tendency to try to overcomplicate things, to put a hat on a hat, as they say. So I love to see a puzzle that puts a hat on a hat but does so for a good reason, and mildly ribs itself for doing so. Unusually, this puzzle has two unconnected sections, each shaped like a different kind of a hat, and each with its own revealer. The top section's revealer at 10-Across is PUT A LID ON IT, clued as ["I've heard enough!" ... and what the constructor did to the bottom part of this grid], while the bottom section's revealer is PUT A HAT ON A HAT, clued as [Oversell a joke... and 10-Across twice... and do what this entire grid does... oh god, even this clue is doing it...]. It's a delightfully weird and meta theme and I'm not sure I have anything else to say about it; it kind of speaks for itself!

Indie puzzle highlights

July 17: Stay in the Loop (halle, Puzzmo)

July 17: Puzzle Pieces (Ada Nicolle, Dissonant Grids)

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Stay in the Loop (halle)

I write a lot of midis for Crossword Club that are meant to be very easy, but it gets boring using the same basic grid patterns over and over again, so sometimes I attempt more ambitious patterns. The ones that are hardest to fill cleanly, invariably, are the ones with patterns like this puzzle here, where there are black squares in the corners and the center, but nowhere else. In these patterns, no individual section is at all siloed off from the next, so every filling decision you makes drastically limits the rest of the grid. If a fill doesn't quite work, you often end up having to start over from scratch. So it's extremely impressive that Halle found eight interlocking 9s that are all high-quality (SPOON REST, WOULD I LIE, SIDELINES, TEENAGERS, TIDEWATER, SPINELESS, SWAP MEETS, PORE STRIP) and that there's nothing in the short fill that so much as made me wince.

It's also just an enjoyable solve, thanks to evocative cluing: [Canvas for Charlotte the Spider's messages], [Stressed coaches often pace along them], [When an episode's cliffhanger happens], [What many "Vampire Diaries" characters appear to be, even though they are actually over 100 years old], [The Cheesecake Factory's famously lengthy reading material, which I logged on Goodreads before it was removed as "NOT A BOOK"]. I'm not even giving the answers for these, because they're both easy and specific enough that you can probably guess most of them even without any letters, but they nonetheless feel fresh.

Puzzle Pieces (Ada Nicolle)

Owen Bergstein's "Symphony Series," an ongoing avant-garde puzzle-a-day series over on Dissonant Grids, has included a couple of intermezzos by other constructors, including this one by Ada Nicolle. Given its provenance, I should be using a musical analogy to talk about this puzzle, but because I know nothing about music theory and a few things about poetry, I won't be doing that.

I like to compare crossword grids to poems because they're often working under similar sorts of linguistic constraints. But a crossword grid is much more like a sestina than, say, a sonnet, because it's the nature of the form that the constraints on what words you can use in concert with each other are rather severe, since every letter generally needs to be checked. I can think of a few sestinas that don't feel like they're straining under the weight of their form, but not many. And similarly, I can think of a few crossword grids that feel like pretty much every entry is chosen at will and not forced by the constraints of the interlock, but not many.

An underdiscussed constraint is the fact that the grids have defined endpoints, almost always the edges of a rectangle. I've made many grids, particularly ones that I've built out from stacked entries in the center, that would have worked beautifully except that the lengths of the long vertical crossers don't play nicely, so that one of them is a bit too close to the edge of the grid, necessitating a two-letter word or an unchecked letter. In "Puzzle Pieces," Ada decides to simply dispense with this pesky constraint, and the results are marvelous. Looking at any section of this collage of grids, I can immediately tell who made it - from up-to-the-minute stuff like UWU SPEECH over TOXIC YURI, to meta stuff like STAGGER STACK and SAN JOSE STRUT and NOM DE PUZ (not to mention HOW META), to stuff specific to Ada's life like ICELANDER. Every section is just bursting with colorful entries, and the fact that Ada didn't have to actually finish the grids off makes it like the "Oops! All Berries" of themelesses. Even just the titular section, piling up Z's with KAZOOS/PUZZLE PIECES/OUTPIZZA THE HUT crossing EX-YAKUZA/SNAZZY/PIAZZA, is worth the price of admission.

Puzzle #249: Words in Progress (Crossmess Parzel #5)

When I picked up Stan Gebler Davies' biography of Joyce, I knew I was in for a bad time from the first paragraph of the preface, which calls Finnegans Wake the "apotheosis of the crossword puzzle" and means it derogatorily. Later, he elaborates on that by calling the novel "a gigantic multilingual crossword puzzle, the theme Resurrection (either by whiskey or divine agency) and the language built on puns." Sure, but you say that like it's a bad thing!

Finnegans Wake is indeed a dense amalgam of puns and coinages that's nearly impossible to understand (the phrase that provides the title of this puzzle series, for example, is a combnation of "Christmas parcel" and "crossword puzzle"), but a crossword puzzle seems like a singularly inapt analogy to me. A crossword puzzle is too orderly, too decipherable, to be a symbol for Finnegans Wake. Most crossword puzzles are, anyway. This here puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) isn't really solvable. At least, if it's solvable, it's only solvable in the sense that Finnegans Wake is readable. Maybe you'll be able to solve it, but certainly not in one or two sittings. Maybe you'll come up with a solution that isn't the same as mine, but that works just as well. Maybe (probably) you'll just hit "reveal grid" and read through the solution PDF for an explanation of the answers.

Constructed by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's free cross word generator