New York Times, Wednesday, October 14, 2015

So thrilled to be a part of this great week of puzzles! This theme actually came out of another special week idea Will and I were considering where every theme would be centered around a different game. Given the unusual nature of the seven unchecked letters, we figured we could repurpose it for this week instead.

The theme was tricky to create because I wanted each of the questions to take a different form. It wouldn't have been much fun if they had all been IS THERE A (blank). Coming up with five idiomatic ways to take a guess in Hangman required some verbal gymnastics, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. It also took some thought as to how to clue these — I think the response-as-clue gimmick I settled on sort of piques the solver's interest, like "What the heck could that mean?"

Overall, I hope everyone's enjoying "Do Something Crazy Week," as it's being called internally. There are some excellent puzzles to come.

HANGMAN! Neat to see the seven-letter word cordoned off at the bottom of the grid. There have been very few puzzles where a single word is isolated — I can only recall one off the top — so I liked getting another. And the hangman-style guessing, along with the apt HANGMAN revealer, made the puzzle fun and unique.

I understand why Joel put so much variety in his "questions," and I'm glad he did. But some of them are more successful than others. DOES IT HAVE AN N is plausible. I GUESS M not as good. How about HOW ABOUT H ... not so much.

Very tough construction. All odd-numbered themer lengths (13/9/7/9/5) makes it perfect for mirror symmetry, but trying to get it all to work out is a nightmare. Themers of length 9, 11, or 13 force black squares at their ends, and that causes layout problems. Joel gets around it nicely by stacking some pairs, notably the DOES IT HAVE AN N and IS THERE A G. Trying to thread long downs through that stack plus I GUESS M is sure rough, though. HEALTHFUL and WELFARISM are legitimate terms, but I find these more neutral than assets.

I liked some of the mid-length fill much better, FRY COOK and ON THE DL especially. Even some of the MCENROE DAKOTA SWERVE was nice. And as with all of Joel's puzzles, I appreciate so much the smoothness of his short fill. So nice to keep it limited to a minor ANO, ESS, FRI.

I liked the concept a lot, but it was a bit strange to have the "face" made of black squares look like it was smiling instead of frowning. I also felt weird not to have the stereotypical hangman's gallows used when playing the game. That would have called for an asymmetrical grid, but that could have been an incredibly cool rule-breaker for this (very cool!) theme week.