New York Times, Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Pardon my crucinerdism, but I'm totally psyched to have my 10th NYT crossword, which means I get to be on those awesome XWordInfo lists with the cool constructors. WE MADE IT! Squee!!! (uh, I mean WOOT!!!)

Oh, right, the puzzle... I submitted it in April of 2011. Will accepted the puzzle in September, but didn't publish it until now because, well, I'll let Will tell you. (I believe the reason for the long delay is he has a lot of word ladder puzzles waiting to be published, and he wants to space them out. Makes me curious what all those other puzzles are like.) Note: I created this WORD LOOP puzzle well before Ms. Gorski's EDGINESS puzzle was published, so I couldn't LISTEN TO her (and Jeff's) advice. I don't remember pulling my hair out, but I did need to use A TRIP and ADRIP as crossing entries. Sorry about that.

Did you notice that O is the only vowel along the perimeter, and that there are no O's in the rest of the grid? Indeed, if you connect the O's, so to speak, you'll get a shape that looks a lot like an O. And since O is the only vowel in my name, it seems fitting that I would be this puzzle's constructor.

Todd's grid ended up with a lot more crossword-y stuff than I like — especially WILE E, OBER, OR ME, ORNE, UP AS, AGRO, A-WEE, ISE, ADRIP, and A TRIP. But a theme like this, with fixed answers around the perimeter, is difficult to pull off, and I think the result here is worth the compromises. On the plus side, I like KEY WEST, CAR WAX, NEWSWEEK, and especially WE MADE IT.

Clever idea today. Word ladders, which connect a starting word to an ending word using intermediates where only letter has changed, have become a little overdone in crosswords, so these days it's important to have some new aspect. I really like Todd's idea here, calling it a WORD LOOP, and actually progressing from WORD to LOOP and back, forming a complete circle around the perimeter.

As with most perimeter puzzles, the fill suffers because of the high constraints. Each corner presents its own problem to the constructor, and even if he/she can get all the corners to fill decently, there's still the huge problem of getting everything to knit together. Typically puzzles can be filled from the center toward the edges, and usually each little edge area is not very constrained, so they're not that difficult to fill out. Trying to get four subsections to mesh together cleanly is a head-banging problem.

I do like how Todd's arranged his black squares to help ameliorate this issue. Notice how the grid is sort of cordoned off, forming a SW and a NE region, along with a barbell connecting the NW and SE? Very smart to do so, and it makes his middle region quite nice. Kudos for working in SVELTE and KEY WEST into a tough-to-fill area.

Due to the requirement of each perimeter answer being four letters, there are cheater squares in the NW and SE. That makes filling much easier. In the NW, Todd does a great job. Yes, there are a lot of RSTLNE letters, but I'm okay with that considering the cleanliness of the fill. The SE is a different story, with A DRIP and A TRIP crossing each other. Typically those are reasonable (if not pretty) answers, but crossing each other draws extra attention.

And the other corners, so carefully cordoned off as best as possible, also suffer. I love WE MADE IT! but not at the price of EBRO, OR ME, OBER all in that single corner. Same goes for NEWSWEEK and CARWAX, two great answers in the SW which bring the very heavy price of OGEE, ORNE, and AGRO all in one tiny space. It makes me wonder if Todd started in the middle and worked his way out, sort of painting himself into those corners.

All in all, an innovative puzzle, one I appreciated for its novelty, but also one so constrained that the trade-off felt a little shaky.