Indie puzzle highlights

April 23: Hooked on Phonics (Ryan Patrick Smith, Real Puzzling Stuff)

May 5: Untitled (Christina Iverson, Boswords)

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Hooked on Phonics (Ryan Patrick Smith)

Puzzles with theme gimmicks that affect every single clue are rare, and for good reason. Much of the time, the gimmick doesn't add much to the solving experience, so it makes the clue syntax more awkward with no good payoff. (I'm thinking, for example, about those puzzles where the theme is related to the letter S somehow and then every clue also starts with a S. It's like, okay, but to what end?) On the other hand, there are the gimmicks that are integral to the solving experience, like Mike Shenk's puzzle 5 from last year's ACPT, in which the letter C had to be removed from clues for them to make sense. These gimmicks are generally so specific that it'd be nigh impossible (and probably undesirable, anyway) for them to apply to every clue.

"Hooked on Phonics" hits the sweet spot, though. In this puzzle, every clue must be spoken out loud to make sense. The four longest Across entries are thematic: PLAY IT BY EAR clued as [Deftly negotiate a new peace], TALK IT OUT clued as [Approach for descent], READ ALOUD clued as [Utter pros], and LISTEN CLOSE clued as [Frays commanding attention]. These are all excellent, with [Utter pros] in particular reading very naturally. But then Ryan applies the same gimmick to every single clue. My favorite was [Target of attacks in the lead-up to the American Revolution], where "attacks" is really "a tax" and the answer is TEA. But there are numerous delightful finds in every section - [Literary figure known for wailing madly] for AHAB, [Growths beneath tulips] for GOATEES, [It's key when speaking French] for WHO, the list goes on. What makes it work is the fact that every clue is its own unique mini-puzzle, so the gimmick doesn't wear thin over the course of the solve.

 Untitled (Christina Iverson)

Few things are more consistent than the Boswords themeless leagues, where the puzzles are reliably excellent. But there's usually a puzzle or two each season that stands out above the rest for me. This season, it was Christina's finals puzzle. In the post-solve interview, Christina mentioned that she aimed to go light on the trivia to make a puzzle that worked nicely at all three difficulty levels. I was a bit surprised by that comment, since GEODESY, LIAR'S DICE, RONCO, PHOBOS, PAD SEE EW, and TOTORO, among others, are know-it-or-you-don't. Not that I was bothered by this - those entries span a wide range of different topics, and they're distributed throughout the grid in a way that makes the puzzle still accessible for those who are stumped by a few of them. But it's true that the puzzle is also chock full of broadly familiar entries that can be clued in myriads of ways, perfect for a Boswords puzzle: BASEBALL, ASTRONAUT, CHOP SHOP, STOVETOPS, EMERALD, SYRINGE, CHARADE, etc. I only solved the Stormy clues, but there were some doozies - [Some budget cuts] for CHUCK ROASTS was the highlight for me (and the seed, evidently), but I also loved [Ride in the 1970s-'80s, e.g.] for ASTRONAUT, [Singer of "Respect," at times] for SPELLER, and [Level in a stadium?] for A GAME (an entry that's particularly hard to clue trickily).

Puzzle #243: They Stagger the Entries (with Ada Nicolle)

Ada and I were bonding over Severance on a co-working call and we came up with this theme (pdf, puz, pdf solution), which we had to immediately turn into a puzzle. Don't worry, there are no Severance spoilers herein, and it should be enjoyable even if you've never seen a minute of the show. (Source: our test-solver Frisco, who loved it and who has never seen Severance.)

Ada, in addition to being my amazing co-editor at Crossword Club, is an editor for A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle, a puzzle pack supporting transgender charities that comes out in June. Please check it out!

Made by Ada Nicolle and Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's online cross word builder

Puzzle #242: 3 Through 5, Too

Some theme content in this one (pdf, puz, pdf solution), but I think it'll play more like a themeless (hopefully in a fun way). Happy solving!

 

Created by Will Nediger with the online crossword builder from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

December 31: "In a Sarlacc Pit, but Emotionally" (August Miller, lost for xwords)

March 20: Pet Theory (Ben Wilson, zerofiftyone)

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"In a Sarlacc Pit, but Emotionally" (August Miller)

It's true, December 31 was a long time ago. But I'd been sleeping on August Miller's blog until a couple of recent AVCX puzzles and a profile in Daily Crossword Links inspired me to work through the recent backlog. Not only am I very late to covering this one, Quiara Vasquez's new Substack has already covered it, and that Substack promises to do basically the same thing as my highlight roundups, except much more comprehensively and with much better writing.

Still, I liked this puzzle a lot and therefore I'm going to talk about it! One thing I like about it is that, like many of August's puzzles, this one features triple stacks of 15s, which are way less popular than they used to be because they tend to involve significant sacrifices in fill quality (or at least they did in their heyday). August's triple stacks are consistently good, both in terms of the 15s themselves and in the short fill crossing them. But in this puzzle, I particularly want to highlight two entries: DORITOS ROULETTE and EMO KYLO REN. These are both phrases that will be totally unknown to a lot of solvers, and it's worth taking a look at how August chose to clue them. EMO KYLO REN is at least partly self-explanatory: it's a version of Kylo Ren who's emo. But with no context, that's still going to be pretty baffling to solvers who aren't already familiar. Cannily, August clues it as [Who tweeted "i get all my winter clothes from Hoth Topic"], which not only shouts out a great pun, but concisely tells the baffled solver that EMO KYLO REN is a parody Twitter account, without having to explicitly spell it out. Contrast that with the clue for STONED APE THEORY in another of August's puzzles that I recently solved: [Disputed hypothesis that ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms helped to catalyze the deevlopment of art and language among early humans]. That's a great entry that I've being hoping to use as a 15 for a while, but it's also totally opaque to someone who's not already familiar. So opaque that a glancing clue like the EMO KYLO REN clue wouldn't land; you've really gotta go straightforward with this one.

DORITOS ROULETTE, finally, is less transparent than EMO KYLO REN in a vacuum. But it's certainly one of the very few obvious potential meanings for the phrase, so the clue doesn't actually have to be so explicit at all. [Gamble with chips?] is a perfect piece of wordplay, but it's also perfect as a disambiguator of the meaning of DORITOS ROULETTE: it confirms that, yes, it probably means Russian roulette with dangerously spicy Doritos instead of bullets. (I mean, I guess it could also be a game of actual roulette with Doritos instead of balls, but... how would that even work?)

Pet Theory (Ben Wilson)

A lot of crosswords I've highlighted on here over the years have been Schrodinger puzzles, in which certain squares have multiple correct entries that work with the crossing entries. After all, Schrodingers are a staple of the hard crossword niche, and it's always impressive when they're pulled off well, without clues that feel too stretchy. So it's funny that my favorite recent Schrodinger puzzle isn't actually a Schrodinger puzzle (or should I say, both is and isn't a Schrodinger puzzle). Instead, it's got a mini-theme with SCHRODINGER'S CAT as an entry; the other entry is BOX-AND-WHISKER PLOT.

When I finished solving, I thought "Cute! Two science-y theme answers that are related to cats" and moved on with my life. But later in the shower I realized that, of course, the connection is much tighter: the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment involves a cat in a box, so Schrodinger's scheme could literally be described as a box-and-whisker plot. That's a beautiful reinterpretation of the phrase, remarkably affecting the meanings of both "box" and "whisker" (and even, metaphorically, "plot"). Cap it off with a perfect title and you've got the platonic ideal of a mini-theme.

Indie puzzle highlights

February 21: Seeking Joy (Rebecca Goldstein, AVCX+)

March 1: Let Me Be Perfectly Queer ... (Rafa Musa, These Puzzles Fund Abortion 5)

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Seeking Joy (Rebecca Goldstein)

Rebecca is one of the few true triple threats in puzzledom, in the top tier of constructors in theming, gridding, and cluing. I always think of her primarily as a great constructor of themed puzzles, so the fact that she can also construct themelesses like this one really cements her as one of the most versatile constructors around. The grid pattern here is very smartly designed, featuring an interlacing of long slots interspersed with regions of short fill that make the marquee entries easier to fill around without compromising the grid's overall flow. And those long slots are really well used, with entries like BOSS BATTLE, SHABBAT SHALOM, LET'S DIG IN, SHANGRI-LA, and NERDSPLAIN. The cluing shines, too: [Sock drawer?] for PUNCHABLE FACE is an all-timer, but there are clever clues around every corner, including [Activity with more than just a couple of participants?] for THREESOME, [Gas lighting?] for AURORAS, [Over head?] for UBER, [Supreme court figure, maybe] for ALL-STAR, and [Box checking activity?] for PAP SMEAR.

Let Me Be Perfectly Queer ... (Rafa Musa)

Now that These Puzzles Fund Abortion is in its fifth year, I have to imagine it's hard for the editors to produce a full slate of puzzles with relevant themes. They've been incorporating more cryptics and variety puzzles, lately, which helps (including a stellar variety puzzle by Sid Sivakumar which I'm not highlighting here only because I already highlighted one of Sid's variety puzzles very recently), but of course another route is to include themelesses. Personally, when I write for TPFA, I always pitch themed puzzles, because there's an art to writing a "themeless" for this sort of puzzle pack. I put "themeless" in scare quotes because it really has to have a significant amount of marquee content that feels topical, so from a construction point of view, it's not entirely unlike making a themed puzzle. There's a balancing act between including enough topical content, and making sure that it doesn't feel forced and that it still plays like a themeless.

In this puzzle, Rafa threads that needle adeptly. There are the obvious marquee answers (TRANS JOY, GAY SEX, TRIAMORY, SAPPHO, SHANTAY, SHE/THEY), plus shorter stuff like HRT and other queer-related clues like THREE for [Number of colors in the bisexual pride flag], REAL ME for [Post-coming out self, maybe], and [School periods in which I was stressed about being clumsy and unathletic and not at all about who was using what changing room] for PE CLASSES. None of these feel shoehorned in, nor do the reproduce rights content like [Feeling upon learning Roe v. Wade was overturned] for IRE, [Place to host someone seeking reproductive healthcare] for SPARE ROOM, or RESISTS for [Fights for reproductive rights in an unfavorable political climate, for example]. It's a perfect themeless for TPFA, but it's also just a delightful themeless in its own right; I particularly like the pairing of AESTHETE and HAS TASTE (which share a letter bank!).

Puzzle #241: I Just Had the Most Awful Dream

You know how you have to write down a dream right away if you want to remember it, before it fades? That's why I'm posting this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) today instead of on the usual Monday schedule. Mind you, this puzzle didn't come to me in a dream - it came to someone else. Details after the puzzle, but they contain spoilers, so wait until after you solve.

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

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Here is a random image so that the spoilery image below doesn't pop up as a thumbnail preview:

Yesterday Quiara Vasquez posted the following on Discord, and I just had to make her dream (nightmare?) come true:

Puzzle #240: What's the Deal with Doug?

Doug is not a real guy, he's just someone I made up for this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution). But still, you may be wondering - what's the deal with Doug? Solve this puzzle to find out!

Built by Will Nediger with the online cross word builder from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

February 5: Cleaning Rotation (Erik Agard, Puzzmo)

February 5: Look Before You Leap (Jeremy Newton and Matthew Stock, AVCX)

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Cleaning Rotation (Erik Agard)

A lot of Puzzmo's crosswords have "apt pair" themes, consisting of two theme answers that are tightly related in some way. For example, the puzzle from the day after Erik's puzzle, by Rebecca Goldstein, is called "Eat Like a King" and has the theme entries KAISER ROLL and CAESAR SALAD. These are very tightly related, because they consist of a word for a ruler plus a type of food, but not only that, the word "Kaiser" derives from "Caesar" (so, for instance, throwing KING CAKE in would significant loosen the theme). There's a special knack to noticing these apt pairs. I've encountered the phrases "Kaiser roll" and "Caesar salad" dozens if not hundreds of times, and yet I've never thought to make theme into a theme.

I think, though, that if I encountered both items on the same menu, I'd notice the connection. I suspect this is the case for most apt pairs published at Puzzmo - if I happened to encounter both phrases in close succession, the connection would jump out at me. After all, the phrases have to be very closely connected, so the connection should be obvious, right? Well, Erik's puzzle is a great example of an apt pair theme where the connection is tight and yet subtle enough that it would be very easy not to notice it, without the fact that they've been placed together as an apt pair as a nudge. Erik's apt pair is CHORE WHEEL and TURN TO DUST - dusting is a chore, and a wheel turns, so if you use a chore wheel, you might turn the wheel to find out that you have to dust (more pithily, you might turn to dust). The connection also works on a second level, which is that a chore wheel might indicate when it's your turn to dust, "turn" being used here now as a noun instead of a verb.

It's a beautiful apt pair that changes the meaning of the phrase TURN TO DUST in a wonderfully revelatory way. I can easily imagine encountering the two phrases in the same paragraph and never noticing the connection, so it's lovely that the puzzle forces me to notice it, changing the meaning of TURN TO DUST in the same way that, once an optical illusion flips from looking like (say) a pair of vases to a face, it's impossible to unsee the face.

Look Before You Leap (Jeremy Newton and Matthew Stock)

One of my favorite genres of puzzle is the puzzle that visually represents a game or other activity. These puzzles can be very hard to pull off because of the nature of the canvas - it's inherently difficult to represent non-crossword-like things in a rectangular grid of squares. From working on a pachinko-inspired NYT puzzle with Matthew, I know that he in particular is very adept at this, and that adeptness is on full display in this collaboration with Jeremy Newton. Jeremy and Matthew represent a game of FROGGER in the grid by having the letters of the word FROGGER jump on a series of LOGs, replacing one of the letters in LOG; for example, the F jumps on the G in BEEF BOLOGNESE, so that it intersects with the F of LEFT LANE. In alternating theme entries, the letters of FROGGER deftly avoid CARs. Impressively, each of these theme entries contains the string CAR twice, with the letter from FROGGER landing between them: THE OS(CAR)S (R)ED (CAR)PET, (CAR)VIN(G) OUT A (CAR)EER, and (CAR)RY PR(E)CIOUS (CAR)GO. It's wild that the constructors managed to find natural-sounding phrases that fit the bill, and I suspect that the task required creativity in addition to wordlist lookup (THE OSCARS RED CARPET is certainly an in-the-language phrase, but it's not in any of my wordlists, and it's unlikely to be in any dictionary). Possibly the Platonic ideal of a Frogger-based theme, and I like that the FROGGER revealer is symmetrically paired with the apt phrase HOP TO IT, when it's short enough that they could just as easily have left it unpaired.

Puzzle #239: Ope, Just Gonna Sneak Right Past Ya

I'm not from the Midwest originally, but I did live there for a while, and I am from Ontario, which is the Midwest of Canada. So here's a puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) that comes from my lived experience.

Constructed by Will Nediger using the online crossword maker from Amuse Labs

Indie puzzle highlights

December 25: Queer Fam (Olivia Mitra Framke, Puzzmo)

December 31: Unhelpful (Chris Piuma, Wordgarbler)

January 5: Trail Mix (Sid Sivakumar, AVCX+)

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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.

Puzzle #238: This Puzzle Is Full of Itself

If you thought my recent puzzle that incorporated my full name was full of itself, just wait until you solve this one (pdf, puz, pdf solution)!

Constructed by Will Nediger using PuzzleMe's online crossword builder