New York Times, Thursday, October 15, 2015

I submitted this puzzle about a year and half ago, and fortunately it ended up fitting into this special week. I tend to like the rebus puzzles that have a reason for the rebus squares to exist, and creating dense shapes in the grid with rebus squares was something I hadn't seen before. A spiral seemed like a visually interesting choice that contrasted with typical crossword symmetry, and it would require a rebus density that was much higher than usual.

The original submission didn't shade the rebus squares, only the black squares that were part of the spiral's path, with a note telling the solver to look for a shape indicated by the theme entries. I slightly doubted that the puzzle was solvable that way because the gimmick is so unexpected, but I just figured Will would make it easier if he thought the same. I think moving the puzzle from its original Saturday spot to a Thursday, and shading the spiral, makes it tractable. Hopefully there's still a challenge in figuring out the theme and that the disruption in pattern matching makes for a unique solving experience. (I'm not afraid that the puzzle is too easy because a test solver already let me know that it was "sadistic." My goal isn't sadism, it's merely to provide a challenge!)

It seemed necessary to include theme entries representing spiral shapes, and I chose ones that spanned a variety of physical scales, as well ones manmade versus found in nature. Unusually, the theme entries are symmetric but their lengths are not, due to the spiral shape. Overall, there were dozens of partially filled grids before arriving at this final result.

A very impressive construction given the elaborate theme concept. I'm used to seeing multiple letters in squares on Thursdays, but to have EVERY SQUARE within a long spiral contain double letters? It's a crazy idea, only doable by a select group of constructors. Kevin uses his own custom construction software, so I imagine he coded some special functions to help him fill this one.

Neat to get some theme material besides just the idea of "spiral where every cell gets two letters." SNAIL SHELL, GUGGENHEIM, and WHIRLPOOL (and YULE LOG and MILKY WAY!) are good examples of this shape. (The GUGGENHEIM's famous architecture already was memorialized by Liz Gorski, so it didn't have the power for me as it might have had.)

As soon as I cottoned to this theme, I worried about how much glue Kevin would need. Yes, he's a top-notch constructor and programmer, but the level of constraints here are incredibly difficult. I could hardly believe my eyes to get such little glue, only a STATAL, FIT TO, N TEST = nothing major. Well, HUMBUGGED and SIDELINER felt sort of made up, and BESTRODE … okay, maybe that one's fine. Still, for a grid that works in a mind-boggling 25 words of seven letters or longer, it's great work.

As a solver, I found this one really difficult, my brain struggling with trying to fill in two letters at a time. The NW was especially difficult, with the unfortunate STATAL being one of the few entries into that section. I thought the idea was really cool when I first encountered it, but it became so hard to solve that my enjoyment level decreased toward the end.

Overall, I appreciated Kevin's not just pushing the boundaries for this theme week, but demolishing them. I don't know that I ever would have come up with such a crazy idea. Even if I didn't have as much fun solving it as I would have liked, I do admire both the concept and execution.