New York Times, Friday, April 24, 2015

When I sat down to solve my own puzzle this week I had long forgotten the fill ... though 17-A was a nice reminder of the quality I was striving for. In fact, I feel pretty good about all the 15-letter entries: I try to find previously unused ones, and perhaps one or two might not even be in other constructors word lists. Beyond that, I was happy to get a lot of scrabbly letters into the fill.

There were a few entries I had no recollection of: CATALPA, INKSTER, EDELS and KINER. Nor do I really know these items from their clues — but I'm happy to say that none of them intersected, so I feel pretty confident that the no-Google solvers will be able to complete today's puzzle in its entirety. Some will probably even suggest that the puzzle was too easy ... another "paper tiger" as I like to describe sparse grids that are unexpectedly conquerable.

Joe is one of a very small handful of constructors who seriously pushes boundaries. Like many of his other experiments, the direction of today's puzzle will awe some and cause eye-rolling in others.

It's hard enough to construct an entertaining 64-word puzzle. Getting down to so few words often comes with compromises, like excessive gluey bits that detract from the solving experience. Often, I use "cheater squares," i.e. extra black squares which don't affect a puzzle's word count, in order to smooth things out.

Joe goes the opposite way today, using a near-record-low number of black squares. There have only been four NYT puzzles using fewer blocks, three of them written by … Joe Krozel. They all come with a big visual impact, a how-the-heck-is-that-possible kind of first impression. I mean, look at all the white space!

All of Joe's efforts in this arena use four pairs of intersecting double-stacked 15s. Joe mentioned to me that you get a lot of flexibility when you only have to worry about letter pairs (as opposed to letter triplets, in triple-stacks), and that's why he relies on this basic skeleton.

I was impressed at how nice the grid-spanners were. There's a danger that a constructor will be happy that they just got the dang grid filled, period. But Joe features such great stuff as STINK STANK STUNK!, AUTOMATIC WEAPON, and STUCK TO ONES RIBS. CONFERENCE TABLE feels a bit off without "room" in the middle of the phrases, but it's still a reasonable answer.

Sure, there are compromises in the shorter entries. It's impossible not to notice. (I guessed wrong on the FIORE / KINER crossing, and that was very unsatisfying.) I wouldn't want a construction like this every week, or even once a month, but every once in a while, I really enjoy the amazement of seeing a constructor pull off something I'm not sure I could do. I'm really curious to see the next step in this evolution — can a similar feat be pulled off with less than the maximum number of gluey entries I usually like in a themeless (around 5)? My money's on Joe.