New York Times, Tuesday, April 18, 2017

My last Sunday puzzle was titled "Uh-oh," and I'm sure some people feel that way about stunt puzzles in general. I submitted three or four of these seven letter puzzles a couple of years ago, and they all got rejected — even one I really liked that had the seven letters circled in a Big Dipper shape with the one theme entry SEVEN STARS. Will and Joel felt sorry for me and suggested I try one with anagrams.

I took this acceptance as an invitation to try a similar theme with six letters, but I've submitted three of those now with no success. The rejection letters usually include wording like "we're not sure we're ever going to like this theme...". It's not that the vocab isn't clean, it's just so repetitious.

My eight letter puzzle started a new (thankfully short-lived) club, called "The H8ers", which was a dubious honor — I'm expecting some H8 mail with this 7 one also, but I'm hoping there are others out there who find this type of puzzle interesting.

I like a stunt puzzle every once in a while. No doubt, using only seven distinct letters for an entire 78-word puzzle is a feat.

I do hear grumbling from solvers via Facebook, Twitter, etc., and I'm sure I'll hear some around this puzzle. But I also hear from people who delight in this sort of thing. Curious to see which way this one goes.

Some nice anagram finds, the seven distinct letters forming REALIST, ALISTER, RETAILS, SALTIER. Creative way to "reveal" what's going on in the puzzle.

I could have used stronger entries, though. TEASER and LARIAT are pretty good, as is STILLER, but there aren't any other entries that delighted me as a solver.

On the liabilities side, there's ETES ASST ETTE EATER REES … (ET AL!). Way, way, way too much for my taste. Having done a couple of these letter-stunt puzzles, I know how rough it is to work with such a crazy constraint. But it's not a lot of fun to run into IRAE SSTS ETATS AILES STER (ET AL!).

Still, Bruce did well to adhere to the 78-word maximum — it'd be much easier to do this with 80 or even 82 words.

And we didn't get some that we could have seen: STETS. RETES. TEER. SEERESSES. Wait, that last one is kind of funny.

Someone out there will eventually reduce the record to six distinct letters, I'm sure. But as Bruce mentioned, it'd have to be cool in some way, not simply breaking a record for its own sake.

How cool would it be to get some rare letters worked into the mix? A I Q S T U anyone? Now that would be pretty fun.

A grid with only 7 different letters is an NYT record. The previous mark was 8, set in this 2015 puzzle, also by Mr. Haight. Here's a list of all the other low letter-count grids.

The record holder before that was yesterday's constructor Peter Gordon who used only 10 letters in this 2001 puzzle, a grid that set a different record which will never be broken.