December 25: Queer Fam (Olivia Mitra Framke, Puzzmo)
December 31: Unhelpful (Chris Piuma, Wordgarbler)
January 5: Trail Mix (Sid Sivakumar, AVCX+)
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
Queer Fam (Olivia Mitra Framke)
There are a lot of small things that Puzzmo does differently from most crossword venues, and one of them is that every puzzle has notes from both the constructor and Puzzmo's crossword editor. Thank goodness for that, because otherwise I'd have never noticed just how tight this theme set is. As with many puzzles on the easy side, I solved it without really looking at the Across clues, so I'd assumed that the theme entries were PANGRAM ([Older relative who's into any and all genders?]) and TRANSPARENT ([Caregiver who doesn't identify with their gender assigned at birth?]). But no, Olivia's notes also mention a sneaky pair of 5s: BISON ([Offspring who's attracted to multiple genders?]) and AROMA ([Maternal figure who doesn't experience romantic attraction?]). It's an exceptionally tight theme: as Olivia also mentions in her notes, it's hard to imagine other theme entries that could fit the gimmick. Not only that, they're all symmetrically placed in a mere 11x9 grid without putting a strain on the fill, despite two of the downs (TENNESSEE and STARCRAFT) intersecting three theme entries.
Unhelpful (Chris Piuma)
Gimmick puzzles tend to be polarizing, because when you've got a gimmick that potentially affects the entirety of a puzzle's grid and/or clues, it's bound to have some effect (often for the worse) on the enjoyability of the solve. You'd think that would be the case with this puzzle; as the title suggests, the puzzle's unifying concept is that the clues are written so as to be unhelpfully vague. But I suppose it's more accurate to say that the clues are written so as to feel unhelpfully vague. In fact, they're expertly crafted to provide just enough information for a smooth and non-sloggy solve, which is quite a tightrope act to pull off.
So, for example, 1-Across is [She's in that thing about the guy who says the thing and it's real creepy]. There's almost no chance you could plonk that from just the clue, but the 1-Down clue is [They're blue and in the sky mostly (Wait are they all blue? OK I just looked it up and they're NOT! Who knew?)] and the second letter of that is also the first letter of [Think of decorations, and then think of your house - wait, festoon! This is a boring word for festoon], and with a little thought, it's not too hard to get JAYS and ADORN off of that, and now you know that 1-Across starts with a J. A little more of that process, and it's not long before you can figure out that it's JODIE FOSTER and then it's immediately obvious what the thing about the guy is. (Indeed, one of the things I most admire about this puzzle is that all of the clues feel helpful in retrospect.)
One thing that a lot of my favorite puzzles by Chris have in common is that their voice feels very controlled. This one is no exception; it feels like Chris is in control of the gimmick, rather than the other way around. And one thing that goes a long way to making this puzzle fun instead of sloggy is that the authorial voice is positioned on the side of the solver, as if Chris is working through the entries alongside the solver. For example, the clue for CERISE, [Uhhhhhh I think this is red? Maybe a fancy red? Pretty sure it's not blue, that's the other one. No, yeah, this is red] feels like it could be the internal monologue of a solver trying to remember exactly what "cerise" means (I don't have to do this with "cerise," but I have to do it with "chartreuse" every time). So it doesn't feel so much like the constructor is being deliberately unhelpful to the solver - it's more like our lacuna-filled knowledge bases and imperfect human brains are unhelpful and the clues merely reflect that.
Trail Mix (Sid Sivakumar)
To celebrate AVCX's successful subscription drive, Sid whipped up a contest puzzle in the Trail Mix format. A Trail Mix puzzle is a rectangular grid where each row contains two consecutive answers reading from left to right, and the grid is also divided into a series of trails winding through the grid, such that every square is used in one Row answer and one Trail answer. This one has an extra wrinkle, as indicated by the clue for THANK-YOU LETTERS: [Things to send out to generous friends ... or what four Trails in this puzzle (that are worth highlighting!) are entirely made of]. If you complete the grid, you'll find that four of the Trail answers are spelled using only letters from THANK YOU: HONKY-TONK, HANUKKAH, NO NOT THAT, and KATAKANA. Highlighting those answers produces a drawing of a heart in the grid, and that's the contest answer. From a construction standpoint, this is extremely impressive: all the letters in the heart are constrained by the theme, and the heart takes up much of the center of the grid, so that constraint has repercussions that echo throughout the entire puzzle. Despite that, Sid still managed to fit in the lengthy revealer THANK-YOU LETTERS (elegantly overlapping with the Row answer ROULETTE). (I also really like the overlap of the Row answer VACILLATE and the Trail answer METALLICA.)
More importantly, though, it's an elegant and fun meta: the revealer is perfectly apt, and highlighting the Trail answers to gradually reveal a heart shape produces a lovely aha moment. Grid art of the traditional sort, in which it's formed by a crossword's black squares, is generally obvious from the jump, so it's nice to instead see grid art that only emerges after the solve is complete.
