Puzzle #258: Freestyle 22

Back again with an asymmetrical giant themeless (pdf, puz, pdf solution, fullscreen link)! Thanks to Kiran, Frisco, and Owen for test-solving.

Indie puzzle highlights

December 22: The Uber Ultra (Ben Tolkin, Nautilus Puzzles)

January 28: welcome to the fold (Brooke Husic, Puzzmo)

February 1: Masterpiece (Andy Yingst, The Gnomon)

February 2: Hard Act to Follow (Rebecca Goldstein and Kelsey Dixon, Defector)

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The Uber Ultra (Ben Tolkin)

Because 2025 is 45 squared, Ben decided to end the year with a 45x45 puzzle. That's a feat which a constructor could easily coast on by itself - "Look, it's worthy of admiration because it's Big!" - like a Jef Koons Balloon Dog or something. And sure, PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS is there because it's exactly 45 letters long. But Ben takes advantage of the larger canvas to incorporate a passel of truly zany fill, including MAN DOOR HAND HOOK CAR DOOR, WHICH ISN'T A LOT BUT IT'S WEIRD THAT IT HAPPENED TWICE, GET A JOB STAY AWAY FROM HER, and the best one, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES II: THE SECRET OF THE OOZE, clued delightfully as [Artistic work in which Donatello grapples with a crisis of purpose]. Not only did I never think I'd see that in a grid, I never thought I'd see it with a wordplay clue. [Picture from a water ride?] for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN accomplishes a similar trick, if less flashily.

I could go on listing the nuggets of enjoyment tucked among the shorter answers, too - the consecutive pair of clues [Mischievous little magical guy (derogatory)] for IMP and [Mischievous little magical guy (complimentary)] is a highlight - but we'd be here all day, so I'll just recommend spending some time on this one if you skipped it before because it was too Big.

welcome to the fold (Brooke Husic)

Now we go from a very big puzzle to a very tiny puzzle. Yet again, Brooke displays a masterful ability to do something major with a small canvas. This one is a 7x7 grid split in two by a diagonal line of black squares, like a square of origami paper that's been folded in half, and the four long entries around the edges are all related to origami: CREASE, CRANES, BISECT, and RABBIT (as in rabbit-ear folds).

A side effect of the diagonal line is to create some unchecked squares and some two-letter words. Two-letter entries call for some care, because there are vanishingly few of them that are ordinary words as opposed to abbreviations, and practically any pair of letters can be clued as an abbreviation of some sort, so it's easy to largely ignore them in filling and just clue them however. Brooke makes each two-letter entry seem deliberate: LA is clued as [Spanish article with "grulla" or "papiroflexia"] (the Spanish words for "crane" and "origami"), and SO and ES are given the echoey clues ["You are ___ beautiful"] and ["Tu ___ si belle"]. I also appreciate the extra subtle nod to the theme in the clue for LYRIC, [Solange's "Sometimes, I don't wanna feel those metal clouds," for example], which quotes the song "Cranes in the Sky."

Masterpiece (Andy Yingst)

One reason that the Cool S is so enduring is surely that it's a seemingly complicated shape that should be hard to draw from scratch, but that there's a very easy trick to it: you draw two trios of parallel vertical lines stacked above each other, then connect the ends of the lines with a series of diagonals - and voila, an S shape emerges, as if by magic! That feeling of magic reminds me a lot of the moment when you decode the theme of a good variety cryptic, in which a pattern suddenly emerges from a series of mysterious instructions. So it's appropriate that Andy made a variety cryptic in which a Cool S emerges from a series of dots that the solver has to draw in the grid. The way in which it emerges is quite beautiful, and quite unlike the trick I described above, so it sneaks up on you; I genuinely laughed out loud when I realized what was going on.

Hard Act to Follow (Rebecca Goldstein and Kelsey Dixon)

An absolutely unhinged (in a good way) theme, evoking the Pepe Silvia meme from It's Always Sunny: the theme entries represent a CONSPIRACY BOARD with red string tying together a bunch of assorted evidence (you know the trope). We've got a STREET MAP, an INDEX CARD, a BANK STATEMENT, a POLAROID, and a PHONE LOG, all forming a sort of connected trellis of entries in the asymmetrical grid. Circled letters in those entries spell out the RED STRING connecting everything together. What I love about this theme mechanism is that it relies not on the properties of individual entries or the ways that pairs of entries interact, but instead on the gestalt pattern produced by the way that the theme entries hang together collectively.

It's the kind of theme that elicits a "wish I'd thought of that" from me, but in this case, I'm glad I didn't think of it, because I certainly couldn't have pulled off the narrative verve that Rebecca and Kelsey achieved in the theme clues, which tell the story of a mayor who's using his position to put money in his own pocket via the asphalt company he owns. For example, STREET MAP is clued as ["Are you seeing this?? Like clockwork, every Tuesday, a withdrawal from the city's account for $100,000, and the next day, the Mayor's asphalt company deposits the same amount!!"]. The comments on the puzzle over at Defector seem to largely be complaints about how long the clues are, and to those commenters I ask: Where is your joie de vivre?

Puzzle #257: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

New themed puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution, fullscreen link)! Thanks to Ada for test-solving and talking me out of making it a double pangram for no good reason.

 

Puzzle #256: Order Forms

Another big puzzle for you, this time 23x19 (pdf, puz, pdf solution, fullscreen link) - enjoy!

 

Puzzle #255: Horseshoe Falls

Got a Sunday-sized themed puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) for you all this time around. Instead of the usual PuzzleMe, I'm trying out the new Crossword Nexus embed (fullscreen solve link here):

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).

Puzzle #254: Freestyle 21

Another very cornery themeless for you (pdf, puz, pdf solution) - enjoy! Thanks to Ada for the test-solve.