New York Times, Wednesday, January 22, 2014

I've always been very much in awe of past puzzles that contained "maps," and was very interested in the idea of re-telling a story within a puzzle. I hit upon the idea of a trail of BREAD CRUMBS through the grid, and then was delighted to discover that the title HANSEL AND GRETEL was 15 letters long. It was not long before it became apparent what the other theme entries should be. The trouble then became finding a layout and fill that would work well. I went through several drafts before hitting on a solution for the NE corner which allowed me to include the rebus square while still maintaining a recognizable "S" shape with the circled letters. The resulting orientation of black squares I thought was very clean and handsome, and very fillable for the most part.

I will mention for educational purposes that Mr. Shortz was not thrilled with the presence of the central ugly "TNS," but said he could live with it considering the constrictive nature of the placement and amount of theme squares, and the fact that there was no easy way to get rid of it. Hopefully the execution of the theme makes up for this in solvers' minds.

I'm really excited to see this in print, and I hope everyone has fun cracking it!

Constructor Jared Banta of Superior, Colo., makes his debut today with a very clever theme idea. Generally solvers (especially new ones) don't expect a rebus element on a Wednesday, so I'm girding myself for complaints about the lower-left and upper-right corners.

Neat idea today; I really like puzzles visually representing something. The formation of a trail of bread crumbs from HOME to the WITCH was pretty neat to uncover. And the trail itself, depicted using circled letters, is beautifully laid out, giving a meandering path through the forest of letters. Very cool debut.

I stay away from rebus puzzles these days, as I personally think they're overdone unless there's a really good reason for them. Today, I really like having just those two rebus squares, making for a surprising a-ha moment when I struggled in the SW. And having the central answer refer to the places where the path started and ended was very helpful. Elegant way to do it.

For me, this felt like a case where "less is more" would have been appreciated. To start, I wasn't a fan of the lack of symmetry in the theme answers (ANDERSEN not having a symmetrically placed theme answer). Many will be okay with that, but I appreciate the beauty in the symmetry required out of crosswords. It's totally fine, even laudable to break crossword symmetry rules if there's a good reason (I did like the asymmetrical winding path, for instance), but I didn't think it was worth it here.

In addition, the huge amount of fill (four long theme answers plus BREAD CRUMBS strewn about) made for a difficult construction. Generally there's some great stuff (super impressive considering it's a debut puzzle) like NEAR BEER, CESAR RITZ, and HOME BREW, but EAT NO FAT felt to me like a strange partial (not really a lexical chunk on its own), plus tossing in the arbitrary TWO ROW, long partial A BEAR and the awkward RELOG felt pricey. And TNS, we shall not speak of ye. I imagine less theme density would have allowed for sparklier/cleaner entries.

Great idea, looking forward to more from Jared.