I
have today’s NYT puzzle. It’s my second publication in a major paper this
month, which paints a very misleading picture of my prolificacy. I’d say I
average making one puzzle per five weeks, and my acceptance rate is as low as
most others’, so to have two puzzles run in the same month is a big fluke. I’d
love to make puzzles more often, but I just don’t have that many theme ideas!
It’s hard coming up with themes, and even harder to find ones that other
constructors haven’t already done (often, in a better way than I could’ve),
which brings me to how I stumbled upon this one.
Like
many of you, I love board games. I also think they’re great to build a theme
around. First, they bring a smile to most people, and it’s always preferable to
have a theme built around a pleasant topic. (The first puzzle I ever
constructed revolved around the five stages of grieving, which I quickly
learned was not what editors were looking for. It, uh, went unsold.) Second, board
games are very well known, especially among the demographic that makes up
crossword solvers. Dominoes and Scrabble have thoroughly permeated the culture.
Taboo and Stratego, not as much, but they’re generally popular and as an
additional benefit, their names hint at the theme answers. Third, there’s a
bunch of board games, which creates a bunch of theme possibilities.
My
first submission built a 15x grid around these four themers:
- Pick
a Bone with Us (Operation)
- Pull
a Fast One (Jenga)
- Sit
for a Spell (Scrabble)
- Stop
Drop and Roll (Yahtzee)
As you can see, only one of these four made it into the final version. Thankfully,
the NYT editorial team gave me another chance to submit and even brainstormed some
alternative theme answers with me, including DON’T SAY A WORD, which made the
final cut
Speaking
of which, here are some of my other suggestions that hit the cutting floor:
- Pick
your Battles (Risk)
- Hold
all the Cards (Monopoly)
- Jump
at the Chance (Checkers)
- It’s
Anyone’s Guess (Clue)
- Draw
a Conclusion (Pictionary)
I
think most of these are solid, but I wish I could’ve gotten Pick Your Battles
into the puzzle. I played a lot of Risk as a kid, both over Christmas break
with my dad and brother (games which typically ended in tears for someone) and
later as a high schooler when we couldn’t get enough people for poker. I also
think that it’s a very strong theme answer – squarely in the language as a
stand-alone phrase, and squarely on point with how Risk is played. I just
couldn’t think of another 15-letter phrase (needed to be 15 letters for
symmetry purposes) that made the grade. If you can, let me know! Actually,
don’t, because it’ll bum me out.
* * *
Once
I had my theme answers, I experimented with the best ways to place them in a
grid. 14-letter answers can be tough to work with, because they require that
single black square at the end. One black square may not seem like a big deal,
but that lone block has a significant limiting effect. There are 15 rows and we
need to put the 14s in two of them (symmetrically). Rows 1, 2, 14, and 15 are
out, like always. Row 8 is out because it would make symmetry impossible. Rows 7 and 9 are out as well because the themers would be right on top
of each other. Now, if these 14s were 15s, I could slip them into Rows 3 and 13,
but that damn black square at the end of the 14s creates a two-letter word,
which is verboten.
So,
now my options are limited to Rows 4, 5, 6 (with its partner going into Row 12,
11, or 10), and I’ve still got to find homes for my 12-letter themers. It’s not
necessarily a fatal issue, but a lack of flexibility can potentially result in
an unfillable puzzle, and I don’t always have the best instincts for how to lay
out my themers to have the most flexibility with the fill. Maybe there’s
software out there that solves for this problem, but I’m a bit old-fashioned in
that I only use Matt Ginsberg’s clue database and Phil. So, for me it’s trial
and error – sometimes quite a bit of trial and error.
While
I’m happy with the finished product, I would have preferred a more open grid.
Those blocks running diagonally, beginning with the block at the end of TERM,
have the effect of segmenting the grid more than I normally like. Like I’ve
said, I’m not the best grid designer. I tried a number of different grid possibilities
and this was the best I could come up with. Hopefully it didn’t detract from
the solve. On the plus side, I was able to avoid cheater squares. I had a
version of this puzzle that contained blocks on the ‘S’ in ETAS and the ‘H’ in
HARE, but the fill didn’t improve enough in my opinion to warrant them.
Once
I placed my theme answers and sprinkled in the black squares to get a
reasonable-looking grid, I needed to fill in the rest of the grid. Those
non-theme answers are collectively called the “fill,” appropriately enough. To
begin the fill, I do what many constructors do – start with the area that could
give me the most trouble. If I can tackle that section without any sacrifice in
quality, I know I have a chance to create a strong puzzle. Here, I had very few
options for 49-Down (Y_C_ _ _), but I thought I was able to “escape” the
south-central section cleanly. 9-Down and 10-Down also created challenges, in
part because of their length but also because they cross two themers, which
constricted my options – for a second, I flirted with OZZFEST instead of
SELFISH, but in the end, the Zs wouldn’t cooperate. Also, even though Wikipedia tells me it was
staged as recently as 2018, OZZFEST felt dated to me. (Which would you have
preferred, SELFISH or OZZFEST?)
I ended
up with two versions of possible fill. I’ve posted them both below because I
found it interesting to discover as I started constructing how drastically
different the fill could be with the same anchors. Odds are, you’ll prefer some
words in Fill 1 to their counterpart in Fill 2, and vice versa. There are
always tradeoffs, and divining which option will best appeal to solvers (and
editors) is always a bit of a guess, for me at least.
 |
| You'll
notice that neither of these grids represents the final product - the
NYT made some tweaks to the south-central portion of the grid on the
right. |
When
constructing a crossword, I pay closest attention to the fill. I can’t control
whether a solver will enjoy my theme or not, but I do always have the ability
to make the rest of the puzzle pleasant. For me, there’s often a push-and-pull
between generating the cleanest fill possible (that is, minimizing crosswordese
and making the “glue” as innocuous as can be) and creating a puzzle with some
sparkly longdowns (I’ve just decided to drop the hyphen and make this an
official term). I normally opt for a cleaner fill. Sid Sivakumar noted recently that
“[r]ough patches of short fill are like plot holes or continuity errors
in a movie. I can ignore minor blips, but more jarring errors pull me out of
the immersive experience.” I think that’s a great guideline to follow. A little
bit of crosswordese is inevitable, but too much in one area, or too egregious
an entry, can spoil the solving experience. Naturally, what’s egregious is
subjective. I think my worst offenders in today’s puzzle were ETAS and ENOL. I
could’ve cleaned these up by putting a block at the S in TAILSPIN, but then I’d
lose out on both TAILSPIN and TITANIUM. I thought those entries were worth the dabs of glue
that they necessitated. I hope you agree. Maybe (ideally) you didn’t even have
any objections to the fill and had a great solving experience. Then again,
maybe you don’t think those longdowns were anything special, let alone worth
the sacrifices they caused elsewhere.
* * *
I’m
sure there are a few solvers out there who didn’t love words like TAILSPIN,
TSUNAMI, and SELFISH, just for their negative connotations. Some constructors
espouse a “no bummers” policy, and I’m sure that TSUNAMI is a big bummer to
some people, even if clued innocuously. I’m not interested in a deep dive into
the merits of this policy, or the larger question of which words are unacceptable,
but I think the topic is covered very well in this blog by another constructor.
My
two cents, since I think it’d be unfair to raise the topic and then refuse to
take a position: as long as the offensive meaning or connotation of the word
isn’t its primary meaning, then I’ll use it. So, to me, NIP and ABORT are fine, but RAPE
and NOOSE aren’t. (Naturally, I’m only okay with controversial words if they
are clued in a way that does not reference the harmful connotations.) Same
concept for historical figures: I won’t make a puzzle with HITLER or STALIN,
who to me are primarily known for their evil acts, but I have no problem at all
with CRUZ, AOC et al., because even though they are extremely unpopular with
certain swaths of the population, they aren’t evil, no matter how much you hate
their political positions. That’s just where I draw my line. Other constructors
draw theirs elsewhere, and that’s cool too. Back to the puzzle.
One
neat thing about the NYT process is that they send you a proof of your crossword
about two weeks before it’s due to run. (As an aside, getting that email after
having a puzzle chilling in their queue for almost a year is the best dopamine
rush an office worker like me gets these days.) I was pleased to see that most
of my fill had survived. A lot of my clues had been revised, but that's par for the course, as the editors often tweak these from your original submission to
ensure a consistent voice from day to day. The NYT also welcomes feedback on their alterations. When my first puzzle ran, I made
only one comment, mostly because I liked their changes but also because I
didn’t want to step on any toes. This time around, I took my job as a test-solver
more seriously and commented on between 5-10 clues. (I hope that didn’t piss
anyone off. I know I don’t always love when clients give me
notes.) Some of my feedback was graciously accepted and incorporated into the
final version. I’m a big fan of this collaborative effort and I think it makes
for the best puzzle possible.
This post ended up a lot longer than I was expecting. If you made it this far, thanks for
reading. I hope it didn't come off as pompous or self-absorbed. Hopefully it proved helpful or at least interesting to some of you. Feel free to
leave a comment with any thoughts (positive or negative) or message me on Twitter:
@billy_xw
