New York Times, Thursday, April 28, 2016

Whoa. Entries going seemingly every-which-way! Even after finishing my solve, I had to stare at this to figure out the logic behind it. It goes like this:

• Entries in the northern half go up (reversed).
• Entries in the southern half go down, as normal.
• Entries in the left half read left to right (reversed).
• Entries in the right half read normally.
• If an entry crosses halves of the puzzle, it's categorized into the half it mostly sits in.

If you think about the puzzle in terms of quadrants, it makes more sense: answers mostly in the NW read totally messed up, while entries in the SE read totally fine. Answers in the other two quadrants are only half-messed-up, either reading normally vertically or horizontally, but not both.

Okay, that still is hard to wrap your mind around. Hatchi matchi!

There was a ton of outraged feedback on a similar puzzle a few years ago, so it'll be interesting to see what people say about this one. I personally enjoyed much of it — trying to figure out how to enter the beautiful STEGOSAUR upside-down — but overall, it was so confusing.

My biggest issue was the confusion involved with entries like ERGONOMIC stretching across the halfway mark ... but the entire entry being entered backward. Same went for STEGOSAUR and SALIVATE. I thought and thought and thought about some way of really defining the quadrants to make this not an issue? But you'd need two fairly solid lines of black squares across the middle row and center column, and that would split the puzzle into four pieces. No good.

Once I got the hang (more or less) of the logic, the puzzle did become more enjoyable. I wasn't super happy about trying to figure out if PARTAS was a real thing (and even SATRAP felt weird), along with PES and SCH in that corner, but overall, Kurt filled the grid pretty nicely given the extreme difficulty involved with the constraints.