New York Times, Thursday, May 5, 2016

The inspiration for this puzzle came from another puzzle I was constructing that included the entry ACE IN THE HOLE. It struck me that it would be fun to interpret that literally. That idea led me to try hiding ACE in a solitary black square and building words around those. I had never used that gimmick before so it was a nice opportunity to see if I could pull it off.

The construction had one major challenge: where to place the ACEs and, related to that, satisfying the symmetry constraint for the theme answers. The four theme entries exploiting the two corner ACEs were the easy ones. The two side ACEs worked well for their corresponding across entries, one of which is the revealer. However, it took a bit of work to settle on the down entries for these two since ACE had to appear in the middle of those entries. There are surprisingly few decent choices for these. Eventually, I settled on ???ACE???? (and its symmetric counterpart) leading to the grid you see.

Will and Joel improved a number of the clues to make the puzzle appropriate for a Thursday. I'm very happy with the result. I hope solvers enjoy it!

ACEs hidden IN THE HOLEs (see below for a visual representation). I like that David separated the four "holes" from any other black squares — if they had been connected to others, that would have made them look less hole-like. That was important to Ellen and me when we did our FIRE IN THE HOLE a while back.

Fun to find those ACES, AMAZING GRACE the best of the bunch for me. I almost always enjoy uncovering rebus-like strings when they're part of a colorful phrase. (ACE)TATE, VERS(ACE), LIBER(ACE), ADJ(ACE)NT TO are all fine entries, though I don't get nearly the same rush as I did upon figuring out that the odd AMAZINGGR string should actually be parsed into AMAZING GRACE.

Tough to fill a puzzle with both snazziness and cleanliness once so many crossing theme entries get fixed into place. Notice how each theme pair seriously constrains a corner. Those big SW and NE areas are especially tough to work with once you fix ADJACENT TO/ACE IN THE HOLE and AMAZING GRACE/CRETACEOUS in place. I like bonus material such as IRONWARE and DEMORNAY. DERR and ANO/BLAU … not so much.

The other corners are tough, too, since fixing those intersecting perimeter answers into place puts heavy constraints on the adjacent fill. I love BLACK SHEEP and JULES VERNE as long fill. I don't love IIN, EEKs, STA, or IS OUR crossing ESE. They're all reasonable trade-offs, but they keep the puzzle from being outstandingly-filled in my eyes.

I'm curious to see how the NYT digital team is going to represent this one. I was a little disappointed that the print version didn't change those four special black squares into black circles, or at least round off the corners. Would have been fun and different.