New York Times, Thursday, October 31, 2013

As a magician, I am once again pleased to add a little bit of illusion to the New York Times crossword puzzle.

The "trick" answer was difficult to place. It had to be in the SE corner or resting on top of a horizontal row of black squares. This is because the answer couldn't start down answers.

I enjoyed coming up with down clues in the SE corner that were slightly misleading, hopefully yielded confusion for CAP vs. GOWN, THE vs. CAFE, SNOW vs SLEET, SPA vs BATH, perhaps even EUGENE vs SEATTLE.

The most challenging aspect of the puzzle was finding four Halloween creatures that were the same word-length. I was afforded a little flexibility with VAMPIRE and DRACULA being both seven letters long. At one point I had SPECTER but nixed it because I thought one could argue that a specter/ghost also wouldn't have a reflection.

Eventually, I stumbled upon the Universal Monsters characters and felt like the crossword gods were blessing me. All hail the crossword gods!

Hope you enjoyed the puzzle and Happy Halloween!

I haven't been this impressed by a puzzle in quite a while. Such a fun solve; the trick of DRACULA not having a reflection completely mystifying until the very end. I love it when someone breaks the rules of crosswords. David did a masterful job of lulling us to sleep by having us fill in the three mirrored entries and then hits us with the killer finale.

Sometimes people ask me which is more important, the idea or the execution. Well, I had a similar idea a while back, but I had envisioned it with the ENTIRE grid being mirror symmetrical, with only VAMPIRE not showing up. When I tried to put it together, I became something of a Dr. Frankenstein, breaking all sorts of rules broken (in unholy ways). Both David's idea and his execution were better than mine, so what can I do but give a standing ovation to the master?

The people in this coffee shop are staring at me now.

A side note about David: he's actually a magician! And not only a great magician, but one who works his magic with crosswords and Scrabble. He recently worked on "Now You See Me" and has developed a signature trick involving crosswords. The guy's skills are mind-boggling. I actually said "no @#$!& way!" after seeing his work.

It's a shame that the paper solve is so different than electronic solves today. Often times we rebellious constructors find ways to break the classical xw conventions, causing all sort of issues for the paper solve and/or the electronic. The paper version is usually so much more flexible because the newspaper doesn't complain if one writes outside the grid, intentionally doesn't fill in a square, or even draws a picture in one or more squares. But Across Lite and other platforms often get cranky and complain.

As we go forward, more and more people will be solving on computers and tablets, so I hope the NYT and other outlets find ways to evolve. Hopefully soon, I'll be doing a review of software and hardware packages that might be able to tackle the ever-expanding imaginations of constructors.

Couldn't be happier about the puzzle today. Bravo!

Puzzles with blanks in the solution are very rare. The only Shortz-era precedent is this 2006 puzzle by Pete Muller. Charles Deber had a similar idea exactly 25 years ago in this 1988 crossword edited by Eugene Maleska.

I named this my puzzle of the year for 2013.