New York Times, Tuesday, April 14, 2015

As I wrote for yesterday's Beatles-themed puzzle, the stacking of 15-letter entries at the top and bottom adversely affected some of the fill. Not too badly, but still. It definitely had some non-Mondayish and subpar answers.

Today's puzzle has a different issue with the fill. The "stunt" of constructing the grid using only eight different letters of the alphabet resulted in a blander, more crosswordy grid than usual. Nothing truly awful, I think, but you've probably seen most of today's entries dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of times.

On the plus side, every answer here of eight or more letters is good to great. Bruce chose these with care. The puzzle's girders are genuinely strong, which is important even for a stunt. Having the simultaneously thematic and explanatory EIGHT smack-dab in the middle of the grid is a nice bonus.

Then, above everything else, there's Bruce's feat of producing a pretty-clean grid using only eight different letters of the alphabet.

Wow. I doff my hat.

When I first started constructing three years ago I was immediately drawn to "stunt" puzzles — one vowel only, no E's, no three or four letter words, twelve Hawaiian letters only (my son goes to UH), quadruple pangram, etc. I did develop some tricks to make it easier, but overall the puzzles tend to have compromises, making them hard to get published.

When Ray Young beat me to the punch and came up with a quadruple pangram in a 78 word 15x15 grid on 3/20/13, I abandoned that project and decided to try the other end of the spectrum. I saw that Peter Gordon and David Kahn held the record for fewest letters at ten — I doubt they even knew or cared about it. I submitted a nine letter puzzle with four long entries starting with Q but Will gave it a "nein". Will also did not like my first eight letter puzzle but he thought this second one had reasonably clean and interesting fill considering the constraints.

If you're thinking of trying to see "how low can you go" the good news is that it is definitely possible to make puzzles with fewer letters — I think five letters is doable. The bad news is that each dropped letter causes an exponential drop in available words, making the resulting puzzle rather monotonous. Will likes innovation, but he definitely does not like boring.

Hope you enjoyed these eight letters — there are a few groaners, but you have to love EASTER EGGS!

Jim and I had another interesting discussion, comparing this puzzle's level of innovation to that of yesterday's. I like stunt puzzles once in a while, and I especially like them when they break completely new ground, or at least push puzzledom in a way that I hadn't quite imagined.

Super, super tough to only work with EIGHT letters within a single grid. It's fairly easy to set up, requiring just a simple program to eliminate words from one's list containing the letters to be excluded. What's much more difficult is how to set up one's grid skeleton in order to take advantage of long entries that are still allowable. Bruce did a great job of featuring these marquee answers — STARTER SET, EASTER EGGS, RAT TERRIER, THAT'S GREAT are all snappy.

It's so difficult to avoid gluey bits with this sort of stunt. All puzzles contain some sort of trade-offs, and this one is on the far extreme, a crazy-hard constraint requiring a large number of crunchier entries. I'm sure there will be a lot of debate as to whether it was worth it.

Having a more impactful revealer would have been really nice. Something akin to ONLY YOU for a puzzle with only Us as vowels (never mind the O in ONLY. Ahem.) ties a stunt puzzle together nicely. Perhaps if FOUR were the revealer, and the puzzle used only the letters F, O, U, R? EIGHT by itself felt a bit arbitrary, as did the selection of what other three letters were to be used.

Because the idea is more of an improvement than an innovation, it felt like the stunt didn't pack quite the punch of yesterday's puzzle. But I appreciate Bruce's pushing of the envelope.

ADDED NOTE: Astute reader Andy Lin wrote in, saying that people who don't like today's puzzle ought to be called HAIGHTERS. Could have fit as a secondary revealer!