New York Times, Wednesday, November 4, 2015

This puzzle began as a shameless attempt to pander to Will Shortz's love of table tennis. I had been making puzzles with themes that didn't amuse Will quite enough, so I figured that a table tennis theme might do the trick, if I could do it in some new way. Unfortunately, I wasn't finding word play that I liked for any related words except "game," so the theme evolved into what you see today.

In my original puzzle, I had tried to use the clues to link each of the long theme answers to one of the corner words. So, for example, the clue for GILGAMESH was "Ancient epic of Mortal Kombat?" referencing the VIDEO game of the same name. (And the clue for VIDEO was "How the hidden feature of 16-Across might begin.") Similarly, the clue for MAKINGAMENDS was "Saying ‘Sorry!'?" referencing the BOARD game. The clue for TORNLIGAMENT was "It might hobble a Horse?" referencing the BALL game. And the clue for AGAMEMNON was "Greek king who returned from War?" referencing the CARD game. I was pleased with how my clues had a one-to-one correlation with the corner words. But I also knew that the connections were pretty subtle, so it didn't quite work. I suspected that many solvers might finish the puzzle without even noticing my carefully chosen details! Would you have noticed?

Will obviously decided that the connections were better made by way of the note that he attached to the puzzle. I feel better knowing that he couldn't figure out how to do it within the cluing either. Thanks, Will for making it work!

I had to read the notepad a few times to figure out what was going on: GAME is hidden within four themers, and four short entries — BALL, VIDEO, BOARD, and CARD — can precede that hidden GAME. Whew!

Normally I'm not a huge fan of one-word themers, but I like Ruth's inclusion of both GILGAMESH and AGAMEMNON. Two epic heroes in symmetrical locations, both hiding GAME = a lot of fun for this fan of the classics. Okay, I skimmed the Epic of Gilgamesh during undergrad. Okay, I only read the first page. But I've come to appreciate how broadly that tale has affected storytelling throughout the ages.

Four long themers + four short ones = a lot of material to pack into a grid. Ruth does a pretty good job of working with all those constraints. I enjoyed the NE, with DOWN UNDER running through VIDEO and MAKING AMENDS, and just DE LA as a minor blight. It's too bad ICE AGE and ACORN weren't cross-referenced — the beginning of ICE AGE (the movie) was so funny, with the prehistoric squirrel questing for his ACORN.

The NW: it gets tough to fill when you place BALL over GILGAMESH with not much space in between. OLIO (the mish-mash, not OLEO, the margarine) is one of those unfortunate old-timey gluey bits that many constructors strive to avoid. I don't mind BOGGS and LILLE, two toughish proper nouns, but everything together might draw some complaints from solvers. To me it's just the OLIO that sticks out, and what else can you do when you fix BALL and GILGAMESH in place?

Well, maybe different options for BALL would have avoided that. There are a ton of "___ GAME" phrases, yeah?

For a "word that can precede X" type theme, I really want some new twist, something that differentiates it from the theme type many editors are no longer accepting. I like the idea here; there's no doubt it is innovative. It sure would have been nice though, to work some revealer into the grid that avoided the tortuous notepad explanation.