Alex Vratsanos author page

Easy to figure out what this puzzle is all about! In addition to the Grid Art collection, please peruse the Visual Puzzles page to enjoy other pretty images.

I'm razzle-dazzled by black square grid art that looks spot-on perfect. For instance, Tim Polin's question mark is unquestionable. My first impression of today's was more of a 2, although the Z quickly snapped into place after uncovering GRIZZLED VETERAN.

You might wonder if this puzzle sets a record for Zs in a grid, but surprisingly, it doesn't even come close.

Alex wisely alternated his ZZs left-right-left-right, making his construction much easier. It would have been awesome to get 2x2 squares of ZZ/ZZ, or a stairstep with one pair shifted, but what are you gonna do. When the giant black Z takes up so much real estate, you don't have much remaining flexibility.

I enjoyed much of this solving experience, although it didn't completely cohere for me. Why pairs of Zs, when the center Z is solo? I often find record-setting letter puzzles more interesting from a constructor's point of view than a solver's, but in this case, a record number of Zs could have memorably synergized with the grid art. Going to a higher word count might have given Alex a shot at that, plus a chance to smooth out his grid, removing some of ZEALS (odd as a plural), NEB, ONZE, PLAT, PVT, etc.

Wilson's FOURTEEN / POINTS played upon today. Can you imagine a president trying to lay out fourteen points today, the first worded as:

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

People would get about three words in before they'd tweet #TLDR.

The idea works for a Thursday, 14 grid entries missing their final POINT. PIN is really PIN POINT, NEEDLE is NEEDLE POINT, etc. I liked that Alex chose mostly ones that made no sense until adding the POINT. For example, WEST is much better than PLOT, since WEST is clearly not a school, while both PLOT and PLOT POINT can fit the story-related clue.

Laying out 14 themers — actually, 16, including FOURTEEN POINTS — is no joke. I started to highlight them to better help them stand out, but the grid began to look fugly.

Note how many themer intersections there are — PIN / NEEDLE, BROWNIE / FOURTEEN, TIPPING / STAND, etc. — as well as pairs in close proximity. It's a nightmare of a gridding task.

I was pleasantly surprised to get some goodies in the fill; GUT PUNCH a standout, but also DEAR GOD and LAY ODDS, CRECHE, LOUVRE. As a constructor, I think that's pretty good.

As a solver, though, I felt like there wasn't enough snazziness in my solving experience. With barely any long themers, there ought to be more juicy long bonuses to keep me interested. Such is the challenge of a daunting theme construction.

I'd have preferred something less audacious, maybe SEVEN POINTS as [Score for a touchdown + extra point], allowing for more breathing room in the grid. Also allowing for a smoother product, not needing gluey bits like ANE ASTA CLU ORNE (yuck!) SWAGS (?), SCI THU, etc. to hold everything together.

I'd have even been okay with FIVE POINTS — the old Manhattan neighborhood featured in "Gangs of New York" — which might have allowed for longer POINT examples, like EXCLAMATION, INFLECTION, VANISHING, etc.

Maybe that's beside the.

JOINTs represented in the grid, showing them as they're bent. REEFER, DOOBIE, FATTY, BLUNT … oops! That's something different.

Audacious to use eight JOINTs, plus the revealer. Working around a single bent themer is hard enough, but eight is asking for trouble. I knew I was in for a rough ride when 1-A was [Some foreign river].

Oh wait, was that 10-Down? SOMME foreign river indeed!

But I was pleasantly surprised that there wasn't a flood of crossword glue; more like a splattering. Alex was careful to not have a concentration in any one category — some foreign rivers, outdated names (MINOLTA ICHAT), initialisms (PTL RPI), foreign words (RAITA, KNUT). Something for everyone!

I would have liked something more elegant — perhaps fewer joints, but placed in anatomical order? An example: NECK to SHOULDER to HIP to KNEE to ANKLE. That would have felt more planned, instead of an etude in building up construction skills.

Don't get me wrong — it's a ridiculous feat of construction to work so many JOINTs into a single grid, without using an entire bottle of crossword glue. Heck, there's even RUN A TAB and OAK LEAVES; solid bonuses.

But overall, it felt more like it was done for construction's sake — is this feat possible? — rather than for solver pleasure.

Beautiful, eye-catching grid! Jim curates our Grid Art page, and he tends to put in more than I would. But this one I have no doubt about — looks like a Magic 8 Ball filled with crossbones! Stunning.

Those corners of black squares (six apiece) don't just help create neat grid art, but they make "turning the corners" so much easier. Those black squares nibbling away, helping stagger the starts of answers, are magic indeed.

Speaking of magic, wow was I surprised to get such goodness in YES MASTER / BOSTON CREAM / SISTER SOULJAH! Heck yeah! That's not supposed to happen with puzzles like this, where so many long stacked answers have to wrap around the full perimeter. (If you're one of those people who doesn't want the magic to be taken away, forget what I said about those black squares in the corners …)

And MAJORITY RULES / HOME THEATER / TEXAS SIZE? Okay, that's equally as good! Seems impossible, even with those chunks of black squares in the corners.

AND BOOP A DOOP (awesome name, even if I didn't recognize it) / BIG TICKET ITEM? Yes! SEND A LETTER didn't do much for me, but so far eight out of nine long slots converted into gold? That's an incredible conversion rate.

Too bad the east section didn't quite live up to the rest. RELEASE WAIVER is okay. MARIONETTES is fun. PANNED OUT didn't quite pan out, those +preposition phrases a bit dull. Still, an incredible quantity of long answers interlocked around the perimeter.

If there hadn't been quite so much in the way of esoteric mid-length entries — ANSELMO, SYNODAL, HELLENE, SARAI, the deadly AMATO / PELLA crossing, this would have been a POW! level themeless. But this type of grid arrangement is so tricky, bound to force compromises somewhere. As much as I loved the perimeter, the middle let the rest of my solving experience down.

I think it's a reasonable trade-off though, as you're bound to have to give up something somewhere with a layout of this difficulty.

SPREAD THE GOSPEL interpreted as "spread the names MATTHEW MARK LUKE JOHN through theme phrases." Excellent selection of snazzy themers, not an easy task given the constraints. Each one of them is sparkly, JOB HOPPING my favorite.

LUCKY ME is apter than most solvers might realize. For a puzzle that requires five themers, having a middle one that's seven letters long is SO much easier than nine, 11, 13, or 15 letters. (Fifteen letters is easier than 9, 11, or 13 letters, but that's another story.) A seven-letter middle themer allows the constructor to lay out the grid with so much flexibility, whereas 9+ letters means that he/she has to sort of cut the grid in half, top to bottom.

With "literalization" puzzles, I like the themers to perfectly fit the revealer. I dug the general idea today, but check out how smooshed together MATTHEW is within MEANT THE WORLD TO. There is a tiny bit of spreading at the start, but the TTHEW string isn't spread at all.

JOHN in JOBHOPPING is better. But something like DJANGO UNCHAINED spreads things out so much more nicely.

Tough to build a grid around five themers with both smoothness and snazz. I enjoyed RED SKELTON even though I didn't totally remember who that was — fun name — and GRAND JUROR made for another bonus. TANK TOP with its "bare arms" wordplay also added some fun. Along with WINDSOR and LAGASSE too, I thought Alex did well here.

Not as well in short fill. Too many of one type of crossword glue bogs me down, so three prefixes in ALTI, LACTI, TERA, weren't great. ABAFT is a toughie, although it has dictionary support. A DAY, B SIX (weird to spell out the number), ANON and it's too much for my desire for elegance in craftsmanship. I would have preferred fewer bonuses and dabs of glue, especially given how well Alex did with his colorful themers.

Neat idea, POW!-worthy if the themers had been spread out better.

Neat first impression of those circled letters; they form such an interesting looking pattern. My very next thought was to worry what compromises those diagonal words might bring about — they're so hard to fill cleanly around. So I was really looking forward to seeing if the payoff was worth whatever crossword glue was necessary.

Interesting idea, a spider represented with its eight LEGs in the grid. It looked a lot more octopus-ish to me, but the visual did evoke the image of a spider ... after it's been squashed. (My wife is an arachnophobe, so I have much experience with this. Sorry, arachnophiles.)

Fun to get some thematic material in CHARLOTTE of "Charlotte's Web," a SPINNERET, the class ARACHNIDA (though I would have preferred the more familiar ARACHNIDS). BITE MARKS felt much less specific, but as Alex mentioned, it is tough to find a fourth themer that interlocks CHARLOTTE and SPINNERET. Sure would have been nice to get another famous spider or something.

Those four corner LEGs create such filling difficulty. NEVEU is particularly tough (French for nephew), but the KRESGE / EREBUS crossing was the place that gave me the most pause. Oof. Along with some of the usual EDA GELL OMOO ULM BELLI it sure felt like a lot of crossword glue. No doubt, placing those eight LEGs in such a fixed pattern makes for a very difficult filling challenge. I'd be interested to see what a few cheater squares would do to improve the final product — I wonder if a black square at the end of KRESGE and/or EREBUS would have allowed for a better result in the SE corner, for example.

It would have been nice to get a more spider-like visual — sort of like the logo on Spider-man's chest — but still, an interesting grid image with three really nice interlocking theme answers.

Nice idea, taking four words and combining them in different pairs to form longer words. All the cross-referenced clues got tiring for me during the solve, but I did like how rigorous Alex was, using a logical sequence of combining keywords 1&2, then following with the order 1&3, 1&4, 2&3, 2&4, 3&4. The engineer in me likes when things are structured.

I wish all of the combinations had resulted in colorful entries. HEAD SHOT is a great phrase, as is LONG SHOT. HEADLONG isn't bad. But OVERLONG is not something I commonly see, and OVERHEAD and OVERSHOT are just neutral in my book.

I also wish the themers had been stronger. I know some solvers don't mind "dictionary definitions" in their grids, but seeing EXPENSE TYPE is pretty boring to me (and I work in finance!). WENT TOO FAR is much better in my eyes, since it's a phrase I hear in conversation. NOT A GOOD BET, similarly. YEARBOOK PHOTOGRAPH is so close … but YEARBOOK PICTURE or YEARBOOK PHOTO sound so much more natural to my ear.

Not an easy layout, what with the six themers and the four key words in the corners. So I appreciate that Alex worked in some good long fill, the AUTOBOT / SKELETOR pair my favorite (says a lot about my immaturity). I thought CHILI DOG was great too.

As will happen with tougher layouts, some long fill felt a bit wonky to me. I enjoyed learning about PEARLFISH, but this huge Samuel L. Jackson fan couldn't recall EVES BAYOU to save his life. I'll have to go watch it. AGEMATES and ILL-KEPT (unkempt?) also fell flat for me. Just personal opinion.

A friend of mine mentioned that Will asked her to reduce the number of short (3-5 letter) answers in her Sunday grid, and I wondered why that was. Today, I can see it. With so much short stuff around the perimeter, it felt to me like the puzzle was stuffed with filler material. Granted, starting with some gluey stuff in OOX, SMEE, COCAS, ETUI probably accentuated the effect, but there was such a bolus of short material around the entire perimeter that it was hard to ignore.

Two of crossword's young guns team up for a two-fer today, theme answers which contain two words, each of which can precede CARD. This type of "both words can precede" theme sometimes results in tortured-sounding themers — it's a tough constraint to work with — so it's a good sign that I didn't pick up the gimmick until the very end. CREDIT REPORT, HOLE PUNCH, NAME CALLING, TRADING POST, and HIGH SCORE are all fairly colorful entries.

I also enjoyed getting a younger vibe to the puzzle, executed in a manner accessible to not just Alex and Sam's generation. VIP ROOM is great fill, and although it's something I'd doubtful ever get access to in real life, it was immediately understandable. CADDY clued as the nickname for Cadillac was nice, too. And ["Oh puh-leeze!" facial expression] for EYEROLL made me long for the (good) OLD DAYS. (In a good way, I promise.)

It was a curious SMASH-UP of cool entries like BIG PAPI and ones that didn't quite hit home for me. DO IT NOW felt a bit contrived, and the outdated ROZ / RAZR felt like something us 40-somethings would put into a puzzle. ACEY is something I usually try to avoid because it can really only be clued in one way. And in a puzzle about cards, it threw me off, making me wonder if it was part of the theme somehow.

Speaking of that, although I liked the implied phrases of CREDIT (card), PUNCH (card), CALLING (card), etc., I found it odd that HOLE (card) and HIGH (card) were related to the revealer, while the others were not. Felt like there was untapped potential somehow, perhaps to use those in a way so the puzzle ended with a bigger bang than PAIR OF CARDS, which sounds like a dictionary definition.

Overall, a good amount of nice material on a tough construction. As Alex mentioned, ending with a 12-letter entry creates all sorts of difficulties. I particularly liked the creativity in where they placed PAIRS OF CARDS; unusual.

One of the new generation of young constructors, Alex has come a long way with his gridwork skills. Over the past few years, he's sent me some grids to evaluate, and they've improved immensely. It's great to see how little glue he uses today even in the face of ten quasi-themers, really only SEIZER, SSR, SEG, and UNA. It's nice work.

I hadn't heard this trivia question until very recently, in a Matt Gaffney Weekly Crossword Contest. I'm not wild about word searching after the puzzle is done (the satisfaction of completing every box is tarnished a bit when I realize I'm not actually done yet), but I can see how others might really enjoy figuring out where the ten body parts are. I've highlighted them in blue in case you missed any. It would have been really neat to hide the theme more sneakily, not so transparent with the overt note to start the puzzle, but I'm not sure how to do that unless it was in the vein of a contest like Matt's meta-puzzle or perhaps the NYT puzzle Alex referred to.

I like how Alex was able to fairly seamlessly incorporate the ten body parts into other words — I wouldn't even noticed a majority of them if the note hadn't been there. The little GUM hiding in GUMP took me forever to find, it was that well-hidden. The one exception I had was in SACAGAWEA. SACAJAWEA looks so odd to me, always reading about her with the G spelling. And not being totally familiar with JA RULE, I didn't think twice to even question GA RULE. Granted, I really should have at least recognized JA RULE as he's reasonably famous rapper, but I would have much preferred JAW to be hidden in something like NINJA WARRIOR or even JAWAHARLAL NEHRU (which is the magic 15 letter length!). Personal preference of course, as the "proper" spelling of SACAGAWEA is controversial.

A lot of nice fill today, PEACE OUT and MASHUP my favorites, along with a really cool clue for MOZART. Sometimes I get turned off by trivia clues, but to learn that Mozart supposedly identified the pitch of a pig's squeal was a real treat.

Crosswords are like cars. There are some universal assets for both: great themes and strong fill for crosswords, and gas mileage and reliability for cars. But it makes a lot of sense for car makers to create "concept cars" to show off what might be possible. These concept cars may not be very practical, but they sure are cool to look at. It wouldn't be much fun if EVERY car were a concept car, but one every once in a while creates a lot of buzz.

Today's puzzle is in that vein for me. It's crazy-looking pattern. Eye-popping. Those giant white spaces in the top and bottom scream LOOK AT ME! As a constructor, I look at that and shudder for fear of execution difficulties, but for most of the NYT audience, I bet more of a "hey, you gotta come take a look at this!" is in order.

With any themeless featuring a lot of 15's, those grid-spanners must pull their weight, since they won't leave much room for other good fill. If you hit the "Analyze" button down below, you'll see that the longest entries after the 15's are only seven letters long. It's generally harder to come up with great IM IN AWE type entries when you're constrained to only seven letters. More often than not, more neutral words like SCOWLED or INSEAMS will fit in better.

Out of those six grid-spanners, I thought LIBATION BEARERS and I DONT FEEL LIKE IT and EARTH SHATTERING were fantastic. SEMI SOFT CHEESES and ARIZONA CARDINAL lean more toward neutral for me. And TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE... yikes! It took every cross to figure out, and even then, TAPMANZEE (with MATTI) sounded reasonable. (I think too much about all the fun practical jokes I could pull if I had a chimpanzee. Even better if I had a tapmanzee.) Overall, not bad on this front.

Showy concept cars often have compromises in order to fit everything under the hood, and that's seen in some entries like DERAT, SOLFA and ARRAS and their crossing, the little corners filled with CPL / URI and MTA / SSN. Not what I'd like to typically see in a themeless. Additionally, the puzzle's flow wasn't ideal, being broken into three mini-puzzles: top, center, bottom. I was stymied by the top (which is fine, as I'm sure some people will know the TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE off the top of their heads), without any way to break in.

That said, the overall effect is still pretty neat. I wouldn't want to see this type of puzzle every week, but a few times a year it provides for a great visual effect.

Finally, a few notes on clues. [They run up legs] for INSEAMS is awesome, exactly the type of clue that resonates for me, personally. (I was thinking about spiders running up legs, or better yet, miniature tapmanzees.) The clue for SCOWLED was less interesting to me, going for an esoteric definition of "scowl" (I looked up "scowl," and one of the last definitions was "lower." Then I looked up "lower," and one of the last definitions was "scowl." Some help, stupid dictionary.). This kind of cluing feels too SAT-ish and unsatisfying for me, but I'm sure others will enjoy it. Even prefer it.

Personally, it was a really nice touch to end on [Bright spots], which I thought were going to be something like HIGHLIGHTS, but was indeed, SOLARIA. Nice misdirection.

This might look like a typical themeless construction, with a set of triple-stacked 8's in each corner, but it's not. Alex travels an ambitious road by adding two aspects, both of which make this construction much harder than the more typical ones.

First, note the four long entries crossing the triple-stacked 8's. EDWARD NORTON, POINT OF ORDER, CRANBERRY BOG, IDIOSYNCRASY, they're all great. We don't often see four EXTRA long answers like this, all intersecting each other in a windmill pattern.

And Alex could have made this easier on himself by blocking off some of the puzzle flow. Note how each of the four corners flows in either direction? Might not seem like a big deal, but it's so much harder to get a puzzle to knit together with an open construction like this. If Alex had blocked off the start of DENARII / TOSCA for example, his SCHAEFER / CRONKITE / HASTENED stack wouldn't have had to "turn the corner" there.

Given these ambitious constraints, Alex does a nice job. Starting with the four aforementioned long entries, all great, he expands from there into his four triple-stacks. I loved the NW one, with the Scrabbly JOAN BAEZ to kick it off, and INNUENDO and LETS DOWN are both very nice. The other stacks aren't quite as nice, but that's to be expected given the constraints. Typically I wouldn't consider NORTHERN, HASTENED, even OLEASTER to be great themeless entries.

And there are a few blips here and there, most interesting to me was that they almost all came from the "turning the corner" areas. EDER and SORBS. CHA and ENHALO. IVO and ELEC. DANO and ETERNE. Alex keeps the rest of the puzzle pretty lively and clean, but those small areas get tricky. Any time you have to knit sections together in multiple ways, things get tough. Alex does do a nice job of keeping everything solvable with fair crossings, although the F in SCHAEFER / FINIAL was a bit iffy for me. Big fan of everything from our local Manny's Pale Ale to Bud Light with Lime. (Only after long runs, I swear! Don't tell anyone.). But I wasn't aware of SCHAEFER. Perhaps someone needs to telex me some.

Some great clues today. [Provider of bang for the buck?] was a fun one, alluding to a buck using his antlers as weapons. [Sitter's choice] looked so innocuous, making me think about TV vs. movies while watching tots. Devious!

A very nicely constructed grid today. I remember a few years ago when Alex first contacted me, one of my big points of feedback was to be more careful about the quality of his grid fill. He had some interesting ideas, but too often there were too many unappealing entries which as a whole left a bad taste. It's fantastic to see how far he's come, especially considering today's grid is no easy construction.

The theme today is a little difficult to get, considering the long revealer clue. ATOMIC / NUMBER, which is the number of protons an element contains, is used to clue in four entries: CARBON COPY is at 6 down, and carbon's atomic number is 6. NEON LIGHTS is at 10 down, and NEON's atomic number is 10. Get it?

Alex ran this theme by me a few months ago, and I liked the overall construction — not an easy task to get four long themers at specific numbers — but I asked him, why those four elements? Just because they were ones possible to make four snappy phrases out of? And although it was kind of neat that the ATOMIC NUMBER matched up with the four entries, even after taking years of chemistry in both high school and college, I couldn't recall the atomic number of copper to save my life. So the idea didn't appeal to me all that much.

That said, I do appreciate the experimentation. Other constructors have used the across/down numbers within entries before, including one I found particularly ingenious, but Alex takes it a step further and uses those numbers for a different purpose. The concept didn't quite tickle me, but I'm sure some chemistry lovers will dig it.

I really liked the care Alex took in filling the grid today. He could have sat back and tried something simpler given that he already had quite a few long entries, but look at all the nice sevens: YOU LOSE, INHALER, TEST LAB, HOLED UP. Rich Norris at the LAT gave me very useful feedback a few years ago, that he prizes multiple-word phrases within themeless puzzles (as well as for long fill in themed puzzled), and I've taken that to heart. Certain one-worders like NIBLETS are really nice too, but in general, those two-word phrases have so much more potential than single words. Of course there are exceptions (I like SPINNER much better than ONE WOOD since most people call the club a driver), but it's a nice rule of thumb.

As with any difficult construction, there will be compromises here and there, but Alex does a nice job keeping these to a minimum. Ideally the lesser stuff would be spread out so it's not as noticeable, so it's too bad that MSN, PPS, DHS, all go straight across the bottom. I found it well worth, though, it in order to get those nice big chunks in the SW and NE corners.

Heavily constrained construction today, with a very neat revealer: COLOR BY NUMBER. Alex, a young constructor still in school, had contacted me about this puzzle a few months ago, and I thought it had a lot of potential. Glad to see that he made it through Will's gauntlet.

I liked very much how structured the themers were, i.e. the number and the color were always a matching length. It would have been much easier without that constraint (for example, being able to put ONE next to BLUE), so I'm glad Alex took it upon himself to shoot for the stars.

One question I asked him as we went back and forth on this: why those numbers, and why those colors? Specificity makes for elegance in crosswords, so it would have been really nice to have some pattern built in, i.e. TWO FOUR SIX EIGHT or ONE TWO THREE FOUR. I had suggested to Alex maybe trying it as a Sunday-size puzzle, perhaps with all the numbers one through ten, or with some rationale like one through seven coupled with the ROY G BIV colors. I don't know if that would have been possible though.

Note the central themer, which effectively divides the puzzle in half, left to right. Alex further ups the ante by using pairs of longish themers, forcing a extremely difficult construction, with effectively four tough-to-fill chunks of grid. Just looking at the white space in the NW and SE corners makes me shudder. I had suggested using cheater squares to smooth out an earlier version of his puzzle; glad to see a few in there. Much better than in the previous version!

What with the difficult constraints, I think Alex did a nice job in filling his grid. Aside from the handful of stuff I could overlook given the tough constraints, the one spot that jumps out is in the very tough NW corner, AVANTI crossing ANENT. I don't mind AVANTI at all, given that it's a real thing outside of crosswords, but ANENT falls in the ADIT camp to me — I used it once for Rich Norris (editor of the LAT) a while back and regretted it after sending it in; thankfully, Rich kicked it back to me saying ANENT was just too far off the crosswordese charts. Especially with its opaque clue, [Re], it was a tough section for me to solve.

I appreciate when constructors experiment, trying to achieve something not done before. If nothing else, it stretches the limits of possibility, potentially sparking new ideas to come.