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.
