Indie puzzle highlights

October 20: Pitch Perfect (Ben Zimmer, Defector)

October 21: Untitled (Ben Zimmer, Slate)

October 25: Puzzmo Mini Crossword #25 (Brooke Husic, Puzzmo)

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Pitch Perfect (Ben Zimmer)

Themes where letters have to be added or removed at the edges of the grid are not uncommon, but it's rare for such a theme to involve every entry on the sides of the grid. That's exactly what Ben's theme, with the revealer STRIKE OUT THE SIDE, does; for every Across entry that touches the left or right side of the grid, you have to ignore the letter on the edge for the clue to make sense. So for example, 1-Across is SNAP, but the clue is [Go out for a short bit?], for NAP.

Having the entries make sense both with or without the deleted letter is de rigueur at this point, but it's easy enough to satisfy this constraint by using choppy, sectioned-off grids with lots of short entries. This puzzle doesn't take the easy way out - there are four impressively long theme entries, all crossing the revealer (!): FINE LINE(N), (G)ASTRONOMY, PATTERSON(G), and (B)RAINWASH.

Untitled (Ben Zimmer)

Ben Zimmer has been on a roll lately! I particularly enjoy what he's been doing with his Slate midis, which is unlike what anybody else is doing in any of the main midi venues: elaborately intersecting mini-themes, often based on pop cultural current events. This is his most elaborate one yet, a tribute to DIANE KEATON, whose name is stacked with INTERIORS and ANNIE HALL in the center, intersecting RENATA ADLER (who inspired Diane Keaton's role in Interiors) and JAMES TAYLOR (singer of "You've Got a Friend," which Diane Keaton called the song of her life). I don't know that I've ever even seen such a tightly themed and tightly gridded intersection of this many entries in a 15x15, let alone in an 11x11, where it fits extremely snugly. Normally I don't care much about themes that don't involve any wordplay, but the intricate gridwork here provides more than enough wordy excitement for me.

Puzzmo Mini Crossword #25 (Brooke Husic)

Over at Puzzmo, Brooke has just wrapped up a 30-day series of minis designed to teach solvers the basics of crosswords. The use of minis, as opposed to midis, is a great way to introduce concepts in bite-sized packages that are friendly for begining solvers, and Brooke does an incredible job of fitting those concepts into those packages in the most efficient way possible. In each puzzle, the lesson feels like it's encapsulated perfectly by the 5x5ish grid that serves as its vehicle.

Case in point: the lesson on rebuses from puzzle #25. In a 6x5 grid, there are two rebus squares (the ADs in BAD EGG/RADAR and ROADIE/GLADE) plus a revealer (BALLAD, to be reparsed as BALLAD). In the solved grid, the entries that are part of the lesson are highlighted in red, and here there are a mere four letters that aren't highlighted!

I've often expressed that it's very difficult to get excited about a mini - it might be seeded around a great clue, but as a whole solving experience, it's rarely aesthetically satisfying; minis are generally popular because of the online incentives towards catering to short attention spans. In this series, Brooke has really made the case for the mini as an interesting format in itself.

Puzzle #253: Megaphone

Time for another themed one (pdf, puz, pdf solution)! Dig in.

Indie puzzle highlights

September 11: Fully Freehand Fhemeless #4 (Frisco17, Good Clues for People Who Love Bad Clues)

September 18: AVCX Cryptic 9/18/25 (Liam Hughes, AVCX)

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Fully Freehand Fhemeless #4 (Frisco17)

Lately, Frisco's been doing some wild things with freehand, asymmetrical themelesses, a type of puzzle dear to my heart. They're often built around wide-open center stacks, and this one is no exception, but I laughed out loud when I saw exactly what Frisco did with this stack: four ___ THE ___ advertising phrases (ENJOY THE GO, DO THE DEW, OUTPIZZA THE HUT, TASTE THE RAINBOW) right on top of each other. What I love is that these sorts of stacks tend to force the constructor to get creative with the crossings and surrounding fill - I don't know if Willy Wonka's YOU GET NOTHING or Ducky from The Land Before Time's YEP YEP YEP or Margaret's ARE YOU THERE GOD? were on Frisco's wordlist before, but they feel like the type of phrases that were needed to will the grid into submission and that, nevertheless, are perfectly legit entries and indeed assets. I'm not an iPhone user or a video game knower, but I imagine the same is true of BLUE BUBBLE and Clash Royale's HE HE HE HAW. Delightful zaniness all around, so much so that I can forgive a random vowelless entry (VLN for VIOLIN) and the variant spelling BEDUIN.

AVCX Cryptic 9/18/25 (Liam Hughes)

This cryptic is apparently Liam's first published puzzle anywhere, and it's certainly an auspicious start. As a cryptic setter, I tend to be obsessed with making the surfaces hang together, and based on this puzzle, Liam seems to have a similar obsession. The indicators are always perfectly chosen to fit the surface:

- "bounced" in [Personality drinking Red Bull bounced pecs, etc.] for FLEXORS
- "tossing and turning" in [Tossing and turning, may seek sleep aid] for EYE MASK
- "blocking any estrogen" in [A way to conceive: induce eggs, blocking any estrogen] for IN VITRO

There are also just a whole bunch of clues that highlight wordplay finds that tickle my brain:

- [Annoying nightcore remix] for HECTORING was literally on my list of clues to use at some point
- [Out of creamer, I can only get black coffee] for AMERICANO is a beautiful find, and it's crossing the beautifully surfaced [Filter out coffee's dregs at the bottom of each drink] for PERCOLATE
- [Italian dish made with ingredients of gelati, in different amounts] for TAGLIATELLE makes use of an extremely fortuitous letter-bank pairing of TAGLIATELLE/GELATI
- [Guest feature: T-Pain -- shit slaps, I danced] for THIS IS SPINAL TAP has a definition that, by itself, would be a top-tier themeless clue, and it's paired with a lovely anagram to boot

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