New York Times, Thursday, November 30, 2017

The core concept behind today's puzzle has been seen before, as in these gems by Ashish Vengsarkar and Patrick Merrell, but I wondered if there was a new spin I could put on the idea. Perhaps, I thought, the squares themselves, rather than a letter sequence, could replace the word they represent.

Still, this was just a thought—I couldn't believe my luck when I discovered not only that DESTROYER, CRUISER, SUBMARINE, and CARRIER could all be incorporated into lively, non-nautical-related entries, but also that along with BATTLESHIP as a revealer, these entries could be arranged symmetrically when their respective boat names were replaced with the number of squares corresponding to the boat's length in Battleship! I briefly considered placing a HIT rebus in each of these squares but decided on X's to represent hits instead, figuring that I could only push my luck so far (and it doesn't hurt that I have a soft spot for the high-value Scrabble letters).

In designing and filling the grid, I started with the upper region, deploying my black squares to best accommodate the seven X's. Again, to my surprise, I got far better fill here than I expected— I'd like to give a shout-out to Pope JOHN X for his much-needed assistance. Interestingly enough, the bottom right was the toughest section to fill cleanly, despite the lack of X's. Overall, though, I think this turned out pretty well, and am glad I could incorporate some long bonus fill in JUKEBOX HERO and LOOSE CANNON, and some nice mid-length fill in LIKE SO and ROOMBA.

I was pleased to see that my favorite clue of mine, "Early form of airmail?" for CARRIER PIGEON, made the cut, and I like the opacity of Will and Joel's clue "Grinder" for SUBMARINE SANDWICH. Given its proximity to 17-Across, I thought it might be fun to clue BOOR as "Barbarian," but that didn't end up making it into the final version.

Finally, a note on circles. Although I wonder if the circled squares might give away the game a bit too easily for some, if they allow a mind-bending theme like this one to become accessible to more solvers, then I think they're a good thing. On that note, I hope everyone enjoys the puzzle!

BATTLESHIP! What a nice throwback to my days doing GAMES magazine puzzles. Oh, right, there was a BATTLESHIP board game before that.

*snooty puzzle-connoisseur snort*

Neat idea, Trenton using Xs in a rebus-esque manner to represent ships being HIT in the game. I couldn't remember all the names of the actual board game ships (or their lengths), so it was fun to get a memory jog. The carrier is five spaces long, as in XXXXX PIGEON. I didn't remember that there was a cruiser in the game, but the infamous PT XXX (come on, just admit the shame if you bought one) helped me remember that it was three slots long.

I had the toughest time with CONAN THE XX. But what fun to guess at it! CONAN THE … frigate? The junk? The garbage scow?

Someone make that last movie, already!

We fixed up the answers (below) in case you're still not getting it. Jim did the initial fixup to XXX sandwich. He put in "sub," which sounds more natural to me, but it's apparently the full "submarine."

That points to a thematic problem. It's easy enough to figure out (carrier) PIGEON. But even that one, it felt a bit arbitrary to have exactly five Xs to represent "carrier." Yes, I know that if you look up the board game rules, it's clear that the carrier is five spaces long. But who remembers that?

*ducking from howlers sent by rabid "Battleship" fans*

Other GAMES Magazine enthusiasts might have also gotten confused by the lengths. BATTLESHIP puzzles only have lengths 1, 2, 3, and 4, by gum! And what board game designer in their right mind would make TWO DIFFERENT ships (the cruisier and the submarine) the same length (3)? THE OUTRAGE!

I enjoyed so many Xs worked cleanly into the grid. Weaving JUKEBOX HERO through one = awesome! I was sure there'd be all sorts of gloppy crossword glue up at the top, what with six (!!!) terminal Xs to work around. But what nice clean results.

Clever idea, novel approach to a rebus. If my memories of the ship names and their lengths had been stronger, this would have been an easy POW! choice, what with such solid execution.