New York Times, Wednesday, January 1, 2014

It's an honor to have the first puzzle of the new year. It's perhaps a bit unusual to have a rebus puzzle on a Wednesday, but here it is. And I guess this puzzle couldn't run on any other day but January 1.

I think 2014 uses all the digits that have homophones, other than 8/ate, and that's if one is willing to allow "oh" to stand for "zero". I'm sure some will take exception to that bit of cruciverbalistic license.

The grid was a bit difficult to fill, primarily because of the side-by-side-by-side-by-side themed entries. What you're seeing is the second incarnation of the puzzle. Will asked me to rework my original version. That version contained some rather ugly fill, such as ROYG and TEENTSY.

Happy New Year to all!

I've been saving this puzzle since June. The theme is slight — just one answer (37A) and its four numerical crossings. But it's fun and timely. I like the fact that all the numbers change spelling in the other direction — 2 to "too," 0 to "Oh," 1 to "won," and 4 to "for."

Happy 2014 indeed! Good way to kick off the new year. Pete uses the digits 2 0 1 4 in the horizontal direction, and homonyms of them in the vertical. At first I was stuck around that area, but it sure provided a nice moment when things clicked. The only pause I had was "oh" didn't seem right for "zero" (sorry, Pete!), but that might be a dialect or usage issue, so we'll let that pass.

Pete wasn't kidding — this is a very tough construction. There are four parallel downs which must work together to form coherent across entries, plus Pete chose to go with a 74-word puzzle. The acrosses around HAPPY 2014 are nice and smooth, with just an IANS as a blip; very impressive. I didn't know WATUTSI but was glad to look it up. And the NW was beautiful! All sorts of fancy entries up there, EGBERT actually being my favorite. I can overlook an ENV and and ESO to get NIRVANA and GEISHA.

Some issues arose in the SW corner, though. The high constraints in the middle propagate through the puzzle, and since that SW corner has a lot of white space, it becomes even tougher to fill. CAVER made me pause (I used to cave, and we called it caving, but never called ourselves cavers), and it crosses the long partial ARE WE. Our old crossword frenemy ETUI also makes an appearance, along with the outdated ARTE Johnson. It's really tough after WATUTSI is fixed into place, which constrains the number of fill options and forces some compromises.

Nice theme concept, fun solve, with a bit of crunchiness.