Pete Muller author page

Acme and I hung out at ACPT years ago, catching up, when she suddenly smacked me. (I get that a lot.) One of my puzzles had just run, scooping her and Pete of an idea they had been working on. Neat to finally see it finished and in print. I appreciate that Will spread them out, so solvers got a chance to forget mine.

(Between them, there was another one in a similar vein, but it didn't use the same revealer.)

I liked the visual aspect of this one, the circled-up drinks looking a bit like bubbles in champagne. Fun to get a lot of variety, from a DIRTY MARTINI to a COSMOPOLITAN to a PINK LADY. Very upscale!

I'm more of a BEER guy myself, so, on the one hand, it was nice to get that and WINE too. But on the other, they weren't nearly as cool as the long drinks forming big bubbles. Would have been great to get two other mixed drinks to make the set tighter.

So, so difficult to fill around those circled-up drinks. Any time you fix letters in place, you create inflexibility for yourself. And to set so many letters in place right next to each other is nutso. Acme and Pete did well to put black squares in the middle of the biggest drinks, absolutely crucial to filling around COSMOPOLITAN. Still, they ended up with a FLOR, oddball ALARUM, and a GOW. Hmm.

That's not too bad, but there are similar costs throughout the rest of the puzzle. As if the six circled-up drinks weren't hard enough, putting in DRINKS ALL AROUND and COCKTAIL LOUNGES was bound to cause serious pain points. Not surprising to see some oof-worthy BETO, DUC crossing DORR, TO SAM, HIED right where those two long themers cross. And ORLE is one of those Maleskan-era words I'd like to see elevated to "puzzle-killer" status.

I like seeing different implementations of a similar seed idea. The appearance of bubbles was cool. However, I tired of the experience maybe half way through — I wonder if it would have been better as a 15x puzzle with maybe three or four mixed drinks. Tough though, as that would have given Acme and Pete even less real estate to work with. The freedom of the huge Sunday 21x21 palette can be awfully tempting for constructors.

Fantastic to see a brother and sister team up! I'm trying to get my nephew (age nine) to co-construct with me, but he stubbornly and heinously insists that LEGOs are more fun than crosswords. I will break him sooner or later.

Five grid-spanners (21-letter lengths) plus two 18's make for a tough construction. All those long across entries necessitate a spate of down entries which must cross two or more theme entries. Pete and Sue use a quasi-stairstep pattern (note how most of the black squares flow NW to SE) which is frequently employed to reduce these constraints and segment the grid into sections. Working with smaller subsections is much easier than trying to fill an entire grid as a whole.

Areas that are more cordoned from the rest of the grid tend to be easiest to fill. Let's look at the ROLEX/BRIM section at the west. There are five parallel constraints (five down words that must cross both of the theme answers), but the fact that this area doesn't have to connect to anything to the left makes it easier. Pete and Sue did an admirable job with a tough set of constraints, only OONA being slightly esoteric (I'm still not sure what her "Game of Thrones" role is, but then again, I still get Renley Baratheon confused with a dozen other people).

Now consider the adjacent POOH/SOMA section. This part must connect to the left (into the ROLEX/BRIM area), but also to the SE (the BITO/TCBY area), which already has its own constraints. The result isn't as nice, with a IMRE crossing SOMA. That's two subsections covered, and the constructors have roughly a dozen more to boot, each with its set of constraints. Is it any wonder that Sundays are so much more difficult to construct than weekday puzzles?