New York Times, Tuesday, January 10, 2017

This puzzle grew out of a failed attempt to construct a different puzzle. Beginning with the not-exactly-earth-shattering observation that BLACK and WHITE have the same number of letters, I spent some time trying to create a "Schrödinger puzzle" in which the central 5-letter entry could be either BLACK or WHITE with the crosses using the same clues either way. It didn't take too long for me to realize that my constructing chops aren't good enough to pull this off.

So Plan B: construct a puzzle around a word ladder BLACK -> WHITE. There are lots of possible ladders for this, but I settled on the one I used in today's puzzle. However, the puzzle still seemed to be lacking a raison d'être, something that changes from black to white. The discs in the game Othello! OK, now we're getting somewhere but just sticking OTHELLO into the grid as a revealer of sorts seemed inelegant. Then the crossword gods smiled on me: the game Reversi, on which Othello^TM is based, also has seven letters! So I could put both OTHELLO and REVERSI into the grid symmetrically.

On to construction. With a ladder of nine 5-letter words needing to be placed in a particular order, along with OTHELLO and REVERSI, there are some serious constraints on the grid. I had wanted the ladder to flow downwards, for example with SLACK at 15-Across and WHILE at 63-Across. However, I couldn't get decent fill with this placement. So I settled for the grid you now see and, all in all, I'm pretty happy with it.

Will and Joel tweaked some of the clues to make the puzzle Tuesday-friendly but, for the most part, they either kept the spirit of my original clues or improved upon them. For example, at 15-Across, I had [Actress Melanie's actress mom] for TIPPI which is now [Hedren of "The Birds"]. I like that change for a Tuesday puzzle. I'd say the only changed clue that I don't like is for 60-Down: MII [The year 1002]. I had [Personal avatar in Super Mario Galaxy]. Maybe that's not a good for a Tuesday, but I have an aversion to random Roman numeral clues. Minor quibble. I have to say that Will and Joel did such a good job with the clues that I had to go back and look at my original puzzle to know which clues they changed. Thanks!

I hope the solving experience is enjoyable.

Word ladder going from BLACK to WHITE, illustrating an incredibly slow game of OTHELLO / REVERSI. (I can just feel the irritation of the other player as I turn a piece over at a rate of one degree per second!) Neat that OTHELLO and REVERSI have matching word lengths — I had completely forgotten that latter name for the game.

I've highlighted the themers below to show how incredibly constrained the grid is. Eleven (!) entries to work around is no joke. They are all short, but this fact doesn't make the gridwork any easier.

Almost every 78-word crossword has some longer answers (otherwise, you'd go above that max of 78), and usually those longer answers are the themers. So when your theme relies on a bunch of shorties, your fill has to be long. David does well to work in some goodies like CAL STATE and BANK NOTE. EMBASSIES and GENTLEMEN are fine, although they're more filler than assets to me.

But given all these constraints and challenges, it's not surprising to see globs of crossword glue holding the puzzle together. There are just so many places where so many words --either themers or long fill — are fixed into place.

I don't personally mind a LEK (I like my foreign currencies!) or a REBAG (although Trader Joe's checkers do an incredibly good job bagging the first time) or an ENT (huge Lord of the Rings fan here). Throw in a KGS though (kg, not kgs), some EPH(esians), an ERN, a SEV (what? "several" has an abbreviation?), and an AMERCES, and it makes for a less-than-elegant solve.

I don't mind MII at all, even given my shivers at RRNs (random Roman numerals). The fact that personal WII characters are called MIIs … this amuses me probably more than it should. Neat to be on David's wavelength there.

Since word ladders have been done a lot over the years, it's important for me to get a little something extra, and the OTHELLO reminder was nice. It would have been even nicer if there was some game or process involving a much slower BLACK to WHITE morph, as OTHELLO's quick flips felt out of sync with this word ladder.