Indie puzzle highlights

November 10: Puzzle #6 (Ryan Mathiason, Boswords Fall Themeless League)

November 24: Meeting of the Minds (Brooke Husic and Orta Therox, Puzzmo)

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Puzzle #6 (Ryan Mathiason)

There's a certain style of themeless puzzle that I particularly associate with Universal, but that's popular at many venues nowadays, where the focus is above all on the liveliness, as defined very specifically, of the long theme entries. A lively theme entry, in this style of puzzle, is usually a colloquial spoken phrase or an evocative two-word phrase from everyday life, made up of common words. I cite Universal specifically because they stick to specifically to this formula, to the extent that when I came across VEUVE CLICQUOT as a marquee entry in a Universal themeless a few months ago, I was genuinely shocked.

I've made a good number of themelesses in this mold myself, but I have to admit that I often feel tired of it as a solver. Sometimes it feels cookie-cutter, like the constructor is using the submission guidelines as a checklist instead of a springboard. (This is, after all, the rational thing to do to maximize your chances of getting published.) The short fill will be clean, but it won't necessary be interesting.

Just looking at the grid for this Boswords puzzle, it looks like a perfect example of the style - we've got a pinwheel configuration of pairs of 10s, each intersecting another 10 or 9, so that there are a ton of longish spots but they're spread out enough to make it relatively easy to keep their average quality high. And we've got classic lively entries like A DEAL'S A DEAL, DO ME A SOLID, CAN OPENER, PLOT TWIST, MOBILE HOME, MAPLE BACON, etc. Nonetheless, I find this puzzle simply much more engaging than a typical example of the style. Partly that's because many of these entries are paired with pitch-perfect wordplay clues, so that they're not just there to fill some sort of liveliness quota: [Friend request, perhaps?] for DO ME A SOLID, [Target of a bench press?] for PIANO PEDAL, [Turn in a library book?] for PLOT TWIST, [Function past your typical bedtime, say] for AFTERPARTY, and so on. And the excellent clues aren't limited to those prototypically lively long entries; we've also got stuff like [One way to confirm you're exactly right?] for PROTRACTOR, [Plays around?] for GOES ON TOUR, and [Fell out of love?] for SWOONED, and colorful trivia angles like [Jim's P.I. "office" on "The Rockford Files"] for MOBILE HOME and [Garden decoration originally intended to capture roving evil spirits] for BOTTLE TREE.

Meeting of the Minds (Brooke Husic and Orta Therox)

Crossword editors these days think a lot about "constructor voice," and how crosswords can be edited to exacting standards while still letting that voice shine through. I love to learn about who a constructor is and how they navigate the world via their voice. On the other hand, the crotchetier I get, the more I'm unimpressed when the extent of a constructor's voice is basically "Here are the extremely popular entertainers that I'm a fan of." So it's a breath of fresh air when a crossword gets a constructor's voice across in an eye-opening, formally compelling way - and even more so when two constructors do that in the same puzzle.

In this aptly titled puzzle, Brooke and Orta each highlights aspects of their cognitive experience of the world: Brooke's SYNESTHESIA and Orta's APHANTASIA. On the left side of the grid, POV cues generally refer to Brooke's experiences: [What I can remember very long numbers with (because of how they weight)] for EASE, [Greek vowels that feel shy] for ETAS, [Makes sounds (and colors) with a piano] for PLAYS, etc. And on the right side, they refer to Orta's experience: ["But ___ they do that?" (where "that" might be "picture an apple"] for HOW'D, [What I've wondered when I don't really attach emotions to memories like others do] for IS IT ME, etc. Those two halves are tied together by the horizontal grid spanner MUST BE NICE, [Phrase you might say about how the other half lives], which intersects both SYNESTHESIA and APHANTASIA.

What I really appreciate about this is how every element of the design feels purposeful - it's not just "Here's a bunch of stuff about us in clues scattered throughout the puzzle." This is what I meant when I said "formally compelling" earlier. The two-sided structure explicitly highlights what's implicit in the concept of constructor voice, which is that a crossword is a dialectic between a constructor and a solver and the constructor's voice generally shouldn't feel alienating to the solver - e.g. by using "you" in a clue when you really mean "I." And the clue for MUST BE NICE recognizes that the constructor-solver relationship is ideally symmetrical (in the sense that human relationships in general ought to be symmetrical) despite the seeming asymmetry in the fact that the constructor is a producer and the solver a consumer. And hey, the grid pattern is asymmetrical, but the formal structure makes it feel symmetrical (at least to me - but then again, I'm not a synesthete).