Just because I wanted to combine my two favorite word pastimes.
Scrabble puzzle! I almost always find it interesting to get an in-depth look into someone else's favorite hobby, hearing about the crazy details that no one but a fanatic would get. For all my word-related ruminations, you'd think I'd be a decent Scrabble player. But I only do well enough to play a horribly annoying defensive game, not caring how much I score as long as I block off the board well enough to keep my margin of losing to a minimum. We engineers are a fun bunch, aren't we?
We've had at least one Scrabble-related crossword before, but this is the first one I can remember to focus on high-scoring starting words, ones you'd need a BLANK TILE to play. Never in a googolplex years would that have occurred to me, and that's what makes this puzzle quirky and interesting in my eyes. Apparently there are only one J, K, X and Z tile apiece. There have to be many more words that would fit into this theme, so I asked Amy why these four? Fun to hear that they're simply ones that she likes. Man, I'll never understand Scrabble types.
Nice construction today, a tough one considering the need to work in two J's, two X's, and two Z's. Along with a layout that feature so many seven-letter across entries, it gets tough. Those constraints force Amy to use longer-than-average fill in general, and she accomplishes this by using a lot of six-letter words. XANADU, ZOOM IN, COHORT, that's the way to use those slots well.
There are some areas with a little more glue than I like to see. In particular, the NW and SE corners are so sectioned off from the rest of the puzzle that having an STD and an AMER in there felt unnecessary. Same goes for the other corners, where it's not necessary to have an SSTS or OTRA. I know that all must sound uber-picky, but I feel like it's important to minimize glue entries wherever possible, even if there aren't that many to begin with. Not everyone agrees with me, but I put a high priority on solving smoothness.
It's always nice to see Scrabbly letters in a puzzle (JQXZ), assuming they don't cause too many compromises, so a puzzle which by nature is Scrabbly is pretty cool. Quite an enjoyable solve for me.
1 T | 2 O | 3 M | 4 S | 5 V | 6 E | 7 S | 8 T | 9 S | 10 C | 11 A | 12 N | 13 S |
||
14 O | B | I | T | 15 A | R | E | A | 16 H | O | B | O | S |
||
17 W | O | R | D | 18 F | R | E | A | K | 19 R | H | E | T | T |
|
20 N | E | O | 21 A | I | S | L | E | 22 I | O | T | A | S |
||
23 A | N | E | T | 24 S | 25 E | E | R | |||||||
26 J | 27 U | 28 J | I | T | S | U | 29 T | S | K | T | 30 S | 31 K | 32 S |
|
33 O | P | E | R | A | 34 G | E | T | S | 35 I | R | A |
|||
36 A | T | T | S | 37 S | 38 P | E | N | D | 39 P | O | E | T |
||
40 D | O | T | 41 A | T | O | M | 42 P | L | U | M | E |
|||
43 S | P | A | 44 Z | Z | E | S | 45 X | 46 E | R | O | X | E | D |
|
47 O | A | T | S | 48 A | M | I | D | |||||||
49 S | 50 P | 51 O | O | L | 52 I | 53 O | N | I | C | 54 L | 55 A | 56 P |
||
57 E | A | T | M | E | 58 B | L | A | N | K | 59 T | I | L | E |
|
60 A | T | R | I | A | 61 L | I | D | O | 62 A | M | E | R |
||
63 M | E | A | N | S | 64 Y | O | U | R | 65 M | O | S | T |
Answer summary: 3 unique to this puzzle, 1 debuted here and reused later, 1 unique to Shortz Era but used previously.
Found bugs or have suggestions?