Indie puzzle highlights

February 17: for a friend (themeless) (Ada Nicolle, luckystreak xwords)

March 28: Just Pretend (Themeless) (August Miller, lost for xwords)

April 5: Untitled (Quiara Vasquez, Slate)

March 31: 7x7x7 (JonMichael Rasmus, Sean Weitner, and Andy Yingst, The Gnomon) (I'm going out of chronological order so that the themeless writeups can all be together)

S

P

O

I

L

E

R

S

for a friend (themeless) (Ada Nicolle)

There are some themeless where it's immediately obvious where the constructor started, and this one's especially blatant: NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE is split into two 15s that are stacked in the exact center. One thing that often happens when a puzzle is built around a central stack is that the grid gets away from the constructor, so to speak: some of the Downs intersecting that stack are forced, which in turn constrains the Acrosses intersecting those Downs, and before you know it, the whole grid is filled with stuff that's fine, but not sparkling. That problem tends to be exacerbated when (and I'm speaking from experience here) the constructor opts for the locally best option, ending up with lots of long Downs intersecting the central stack, but little room to breathe elsewhere in the grid.

In this puzzle, Ada wisely goes relatively light on the long Downs, and the 10s that do intersect the stack (which are all assets - JUMP SCARES, YEAH I'M SURE, DANCE REMIX, DAVID BYRNE). are nicely spread out. This allows her to have four fairly siloed off corners in which to work her themeless magic, and work it she does. The northwest stack of 9s is exemplary, with the phrases BAJA BLAST (with the rabbit hole-inducing clue [Drink that was the target of Operation Soda Steal]) and COMEDY BAR sandwiching CRUCIALLY, an ordinary word which, crucially, can get a fun colloquial clue (["...this part is important..."]). Quiara Vasquez has talked about the value of breaking up a pair of phrases in a themeless stack with a single-word entry for variety, and this is a perfect example of that.

But where this puzzle gets really cool is in the northeast, which is an approximately 5x5 section with limited connectivity to the rest of the grid, and therefore plentiful options. So why not choose one of the zaniest possible options? I don't particulary love A HOOT or IS TOO as fill in and of themselves, but when they're part of an OO-fest that also includes DOORS, BOOPS, OOH OOH, VROOM, and NO POO ([Movement where maybe people only wash their hair with water (please don't laugh at the name)]? Yes please. I love it when a section of a crossword has a very specific mouthfeel, which can be a great reminder that (as I alluded to above) choosing the locally best option every time doesn't always produce the globally best fill - sometimes a section has vibes that are greater than the sum of its parts.

Just Pretend (Themeless) (August Miller)

In the blurb about Ada's puzzle, I talked about how the quality of a central stack of 15s can come at the cost of the rest of the fill. These days, nobody does central stacks of 15s better than August Miller, but the themeless I'm choosing to highlight here has the inverse kind of stacking, with the most wide-open sections at the top and bottom of the grid, and with a very small section at the center separating them. And while I feel like I have a pretty good sense of August's 15-stack MO by this point, I'm intrigued by what he's done here precisely because I'm not quite sure how he went about doing it.

10x4 corner stacks aren't super uncommon these days (Adrian Johnson in particular has made a bunch), and of course neither are 11x3s. August goes one further with a pair of 11x4 stacks: MASQUERADED/AUTUMN OLIVE/TRAIL GUIDES/TARTAR SAUCE and SHE WON'T BITE/EATING LOCAL/CHANTE ADAMS/TALKED SENSE. What intrigues me in particular are the entries AUTUMN OLIVE and CHANTE ADAMS, neither of which were on my wordlist. Were they on August's wordlist before the construction of this puzzle? It's certainly possible, though they're both fairly deep cuts. It's also possible that they weren't, but they had promising endings/beginnings (ADAMS and AUTUMN) that fit nicely with the surrounding entries to make squeaky-clean sets of 4s going down, and that could be extended into full entries with some judicious dictionary-hunting.

But however August did it, there's something beautiful about the fact that these fit so perfectly between more wordlist-standard entries surrounding them to produce those wide-open swaths of white. They're rock-solid entries whose parts will be familiar to solvers who haven't heard of them before, and I love the idea that they might have been willed into the puzzle by the sheer usefulness of their letters for those particular stacks, instead of just summoned from a wordlist with a filling algorithm. (And if they were summoned by a wordlist, I still love the idea that they were on there in the first place.)

Untitled (Quiara Vasquez)

...and sometimes a themeless just does the normal themeless thing, an assortment of colorful words and phrases and fun and interesting clues scattered throughout the grid, but does it really, really well. QUIRKED UP, SAVE STATE, KITTEN HEEL, SPIDERSONA, WET KISS, ARTEMIS II, ANTOJITOS, WEASELLY, BLUBBERS, RULES LAWYERS, HIJINKS ENSUE: it's hard to imagine squeezing a more varied collection of assets into a 15x15 grid. Apart from that, Quiara has a gift for coming up with fun ways of presenting basic information in clues. You could clue BILLY JOEL as ["We Didn't Start the Fire" singer], sure, but why not [His laundry is wet (or so a joke claims) because he didn't start the dryer)? ["Thong Song" rapper] for SISQO? How about [Rapper with a cameo in the "Legends of Tomorrow" episode "Swan Thong"]. I also enjoyed learning that IAN Fieggen (a.k.a. "Professor Shoelace") invented the world's fastest shoelace knot. News you can use!

7x7x7 (JonMichael Rasmus, Sean Weitner, and Andy Yingst)

This variety cryptic is a real feat of imagination and execution. The grid represents the net of a cube, with bands of entries starting on one face of the cube and continuing down adjacent faces until it reaches its starting point. The answers include some musical acts and songs by them, and it eventually becomes clear that each song is from a Bond film with the word DIE in the title. The black squares between some of the entries, revealed over the course of solving, then become pips, so that the cube, when folded up, becomes a die. It's the kind of thing that gives me a headache just thinking about how I'd go about constructing it, but I'm glad that JM, Sean, and Andy had the grit to pull it off.

There are many clues I could highlight, but I want to shout out one in particular, for the entry OK THEN: [Well, that was weird ... there was this super-tangled knot and this guy cut right through it]. As a rule, every word in a cryptic clue should contribute to the grammar of the clue, so that it's clear what the solver has to do. So usually, the pithier, the better. But despite being decidedly un-pithy, this clue manages to be perfectly clear about the mechanism, with every word contributing (albeit in a roundabout way) to the clue grammar: it tells you that a word for "this guy" should go inside of an anagram of KNOT. And the wordiness really elevates the clue, giving the solver the image of a bemused Phrygian telling a friend about how they saw Alexander the Great cut through the Gordian knot. A great reminder that the most efficient clue isn't necessarily the most entertaining.