New York Times, Monday, November 6, 2017

We're excited to be debuting our puzzle in the New York Times! We thought of the idea for this puzzle on a car ride one day over the summer, and when we got home, we came up with as many relevant theme answers as possible. After amassing twenty or so candidates, one-by-one we sifted through all the possible combinations that would yield an adaptable, aesthetically-attractive grid while trying to incorporate as many theme clues as we could. Soon after, we manually filled out the grid, and eight weeks later we heard back from Will Shortz and his team. The editing process with Will Shortz was extremely insightful, and he had a lot of good advice for our first puzzle. We look forward to publishing more creative puzzles soon!

Max Lauring is a senior at Yale University majoring in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. He does research in a lab at the Yale School of Medicine, plays cello in Low Strung (the world's largest all cello rock group), and founded the Yale Turnip, a satirical online publication. Max started doing crosswords in high school for fun but always admired the constructing process of a puzzle.

Benjamin Lauring is a seventeen-year-old senior at Tenafly High School. He has been playing classical guitar for ten years and studies guitar at the Manhattan School of Music as part of its Pre-College Program. Ben started doing crosswords in high school as well, given that his dad and brother were frequent solvers of the NYT daily puzzle. He was never interested in constructing until his junior year English teacher, Gary Whitehead, talked about how he constructed puzzles. When Max came home from college this past summer, we both thought it would be a cool idea to make our own puzzle. It was an incredibly fun process and they hope to submit our second puzzle by the end of the year!

Debut! Max and Benjamin give us PART ANIMAL themers today, a nice assortment of colorful phrases such as RAT TAIL, DOG EARS, SNAKE EYES … all of them containing a body PART! Full disclosure, I missed that last piece right after I solved it, so I got a nice a-ha moment when I realized the added connection between the themers.

PART ANIMAL … hmm. I like when a revealer is in the language, and I like it even better when it suddenly makes a theme clear. PART ANIMAL didn't fit either criterion. I would have preferred leaving that odd phrase out of the puzzle, leaving it up to the solver to figure out the nuance of the theme.

Curious layout. Typically you want to put as much space as you can between themers, so that would have meant shoving PIGEON TOES to the right, PIGGY BACK to the left, and adding a row of space between them. You'd also use more black squares on the sides of the puzzle to help separate the themers, allowing for smoother filling.

Max and Benjamin's layout did allow for some wide-open corners in the NW and SE, full of juicy fill like CALL IT, I MANAGE, STRUDEL, BEES KNEES … wait a second! BEES KNEES (and HAREBRAIN) were also themers! Huh. During my solve, I missed that.

Some solver I am!

I did hitch on HARE BRAIN, as it felt bizarre compared to "hare-brained." I'd have preferred to leave that out — maybe PIGEON TOES too, considering how much more common "pigeon-toed" is.

The theme is ridiculously dense, so that helps explain the OLIO of ELOI, INE, FIL, EAN, ERG, etc. EEK! Not smooth enough for a Monday puzzle. It's so important to keep Monday puzzle accessible to novice solvers — this trade-off didn't work for me. Along with the fact that I missed BEES KNEES and HARE BRAIN as part of the theme, I would have preferred a smaller set of themers, composed of only phrases in the language.

But overall, a neat idea, consistently using [animal] + [body part]. Although it felt too familiar at first — there have been a ton of animal-related puzzles in the past — the added layer of the body part was great. I always like uncovering a theme I can't quite remember.