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.
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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.
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| 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
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