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.