New York Times, Wednesday, February 6, 2019

The theme of this puzzle was largely hashed out over dinner at Red Robin. The most important decision was which pairs of words to include. We wanted the Spanish to be fair and recognizable to a large portion of the solving population. Luckily, only one of us speaks Spanish. Therefore, we leveraged the perspective of the non-Spanish speaker to help make that determination.

Of course, all pairs of widely-recognizable English and Spanish words that start with the same letter don't necessarily work in this type of crossword puzzle. This is especially true with 16 crossing theme entries totaling 68 of the 186 white squares.

Some of the other combinations with well-known Spanish words that didn't make the cut were: BATHROOM/BAÑO, PLEASE/POR FAVOR, and RIVER/RÍO. Ultimately, the requirements of grid symmetry and theme interlock (e.g., the shared "O" between FUEGO and HELLO) dictated which themers worked the best. We tried to get DAY/DÍA to fit in the upper-left corner so we could start with DAY and end with NIGHT, but the resulting fill options weren't good enough. Instead, we went with SUN/SOL.

We're happy to see almost all of our clues kept as-is or only slightly modified. Queena has been trying to get a "The Baby-Sitters Club" reference into one of her published crossword puzzles for a long time, so we were especially pleased to see that come to pass.

One final trivia question. Four of the eight semantically-paired Spanish words have appeared in the NYT crossword puzzle more often than their English equivalents. Which words are they? To find the answer, click on "Analyze this puzzle" at the bottom of the page.

Uniclue! There have been enough of these, that the NYT production team seemed a bit blasé about it when I got pre-release notes. What a pleasant surprise to get a twist, a raison d'etre that I doubt I'd have ever thought of. Every single square that starts both an across and a down answer shares a clue — but the across entry is in ENGLISH, and the down is in ESPANOL.

I've tried my hand at Uniclue constructions, and they're a bear. Not only do you have paired themers everywhere, but some of them have to intersect. And on top of all that, because most of the themers are short, you're going to need some long fill to stay within the max word count of 78.

I have a feeling some solvers will complain about the crossword glue, and I acknowledge that the slurry of ALTE IRT ASCH OCS etc. isn't fantastic. Nor is ADORER or NIBBLERS. HALLOO, HELLO?

But the direct experience of working with this theme type (and failing miserably, I might add) makes me appreciate Queena and Alex's execution. It's not realistic to expect a Uniclue puzzle to be perfectly clean, and for me, the payoff was worth the prices I had to pay during my solve.

Not to mention, they even managed to work in a couple of strong bonuses. I NEED A NAP + TELESCOPE + RING TOSS isn't a total KNOCK OUT, but that's pretty darn good long fill for the limited long slots available.

Hilarious clue on TEAPOT, too. Left holding the bag, indeed. *rimshot*

When working with an established tricksy theme type, it's important to do something a little different. I count this one a success.