21

I'm a musician (Kid Beyond) and meditation teacher; I moonlight in game and puzzle design. This idea came after a long day in the recording studio.

I liked the notion of cluing "21" with 21-letter phrases, allowing a meta-reference at the bottom. And I loved creating a grid with horizontal and vertical symmetry — it feels like Mexican tile art.

The first draft had a bunch of grand ideas — like running the puzzle on January 21, with "1/21" cluing DATE YOU ARE SOLVING THIS. Will gently told me all the problems this would cause... so out it went.

Another ambitious idea was to cram 21's throughout all the clues. I whipped up about 50 of them: references to Century 21, "21 Jump Street," the 21 Club, pop stars Twenty One Pilots and 21 Savage, etc. Most of these were too stretchy for Will, but he graciously kept a few.

This is my second puzzle for the Times. I remain humbled by how many hours go into making a good idea great — pushing for ever-better fill, redoing the whole grid over and over, trimming blocks down to the bare minimum...

Many thanks to puzzle sensei Tyler Hinman for all his tireless feedback, Jeff Chen for xwordinfo.com and his wonderful Word List, Antony Lewis for the indispensable Crossword Compiler, and of course Will for nurturing my work!

Hardcore puzzlers may note that this puzzle has only 126 entries, the lowest Sunday word count ever. Now that I've broken a world record, I won't have to take up competitive hot-dog eating! What a relief.

Definitional puzzle riffing on the number 21. I usually find these themes dry, as uncovering dictionary-like entries can be more work than pleasure. AGE FOR DRINKING LEGALLY isn't going to win any crossword awards, for example.

But Andrew found a nice range of answers, from drinking age to the Adele album, to the 21 gun salute, to blackjack. And I enjoyed the final twist, the last themer telling us that each of the themers had 21 LETTERS IN THESE ANSWERS — each of them a grid-spanning length. Fun punchline, very meta.

I was SURE that SPOTS ON ALL SIDES OF A DIE was incorrect. A standard die has opposite sides that equal to seven, i.e. one + six = seven. So the total has to be even!

Oh, wait.

Carry the eight, round down, dot the i's … oops.

Yes, the sum of one through six = 21, indeed. I knew that.

With just six themers, you'd think that a Sunday 140-word puzzle wouldn't be difficult. And it's not too bad.

But going down to the nearly unheard of 126 words? That's crazy! I can understand the allure to work in such great bonuses as ELIE WIESEL, MALEFICENT, ONE TOO MANY — it's important to get a ton of bonuses in, since the themers are a bit dry. But it's virtually impossible to execute on a 126-word grid, without glopping a ton of crossword glue all over.

Hoo boy, was there a lot. I would have sent this one back to smooth away ABLAST, ALOAD, SSTS, OESTE, etc. I stopped keeping track after I hit ten, and it kept right on going. It would have been better to deploy a lot more black squares to separate the themers, facilitating a higher quality of fill.

But I did appreciate the innovative thinking, the wide range of subjects covered by the number 21, and the punchline. Rare for a definitional puzzle to make me smile at the end.