Indie puzzle highlights

May 11: She's a Rainbow (Kelsey Dixon, Defector)

June 14: Final: Mountain (Byron Walden, Westwords)

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She's a Rainbow (Kelsey Dixon)

As we all know, Kelsey is one of the great themeless constructors of our time, but she rarely dips her toes into themed puzzles. By the evidence of this theme, maybe she should more often, because this is one of the tightest themes I've ever seen. The revealer is COLOR GUARD, and the theme answers are all WNBA guards whose last names are colors: KELSEY PLUM (one of the very few famous non-Dixon Kelseys), CHELSEA GRAY, KAHLEAH COPPER, and SONIA CITRON. I like that this puzzle includes WILD IDEA clued as [Something so crazy it just might work], because this feels like the kind of theme idea that you'd come up with assuming there's a 99% chance you wouldn't be able to find a full set for a 15x15, but you bank on that 1% chance. (If it hadn't worked out, KELSEY PLUM and CHELSEA GRAY might've made a nice rhyming set for a midi, but I love that it somehow did work out.)

I also love that the theme entries are all WNBA players, with nary an MNBA player to be seen, though the revealer doesn't require that. A nice, unheralded antidote to the many themes out there that only draw on men's sports.

Final: Mountain (Byron Walden)

If you're reading this, you're probably familiar with Adam Aaronson's square theory, but if you aren't, I highly recommend checking out that link. The theory helps capture why I think this is the best-clued themeless I've solved in months - it's jam-packed with brief, punchy wordplay clues that are exactly as long as they need to be to satisfy the constraints of square theory, and no longer. Take [Sound out?] for for SNORE: the two basic semantic elements in the meaning of "snore" are "sound" and "sleeping," and the clue [Sound out?] packs those two elements into a two-word phrase that just happens to exist independently. [X amount] for TEN, [Catch phrase?] for HERE YA GO, [Generous helping] for CHARITY WORK, [Cheering up?] for STANDING O - every one of these is unimpeachable. 

The crowning glory is [Avon calling?] for BARD, because it's just so specific. There are a lot of phrases that are similar to, say "sound out" or "catch phrase," so it's easy to imagine other variants that play on the same basic idea - [Sound asleep?], for instance. But "Avon calling" is sui generis - and even more impressively, it uses a proper noun with only two common meanings (unlike the numerous meanings of "sound" or "catch"), so it feels borderline miraculous that it can be used as the basis for a wordplay clue at all.

[They're not sold on the Sabbath] for AGNOSTICS is wordier than the other clues I've cited, but it's still remarkably efficient - the phrasing is perfectly natural for both the surface sense and the misdirect sense. Contrast that with [Past perfect mood?] for NOSTALGIA, which is very nearly a great clue. The misdirect is clever, and the surface joins a pair of terms that are from the same general area ("past perfect" and "mood"). But one side of the square is slightly flimsy, because the past perfect is a tense or aspect, not a mood. I bring this up not to nitpick, but to illustrate just how remarkable it is that this puzzle has so many clues that are unimpeachable, square theory-wise.