New York Times, Wednesday, August 24, 2016

I hope solvers share my pleasure in seeing CALVINBALL in a New York Times puzzle. It's such an evocative idea of pure creative play, and I liked balancing it with the more contemplative POOHSTICKS — very different visions of childhood (and philosophies of life), each lovely in their own ways.

I'm grateful to Will and Joel for their improvements to this grid, and I'm also indebted to two other editors who've helped immeasurably in my development as a constructor: Stan Newman and Brad Wilber. Brad's mentorship in particular has been a great boon to me — even though he had no direct involvement with this puzzle, it's fair to say it wouldn't exist without him — and I'm very happy to be able to acknowledge that publicly.

I came so close to giving this the POW. It reminded me of a friend's tweet to the effect of "I would be so into fantasy football if I could draft a dragon." There's something so entertaining about the imagination and creativity involved there. And CALVINBALL fits that to a tee, what with its crazy rules, constantly being added / changed / subtracted. Brilliant!

POOHSTICKS is fun too — I didn't recognize it even as a Milne fan, but the name made me want to look it up. Quaint game, dropping sticks into a river and "racing" them. QUIDDITCH also amused me, but it's not nearly as whimsical as the first two.

Those three Star Wars movies were so abysmal. POD RACING in particular felt like a marketing team pushing Lucas to come up with something they could use to sell toys to kids. Sigh. Man oh man, I hated POD RACING.

My personal icky feelings around POD RACING aside, a nice debut grid. I've had the pleasure of working with Matt on a grid that was recently accepted, and I loved seeing some of his style come out in CONTRETEMPTS (what a great word!), SOUNDTRACKS, KICK ME / EDISON. Always fun to see what constructors select for their puzzles, especially what they pick for long bonus fill — that's where a person's voice often really comes through.

It's a tough construction, what with FANTASY SPORTS in the middle of the puzzle, and four more themers spread around. That QUIDDITCH / POOHSTICKS overlap is unsurprisingly the crunchiest area, with ILO / UNCAS / ROSEN. They're all fair game for a Wednesday, but it did feel like a pile-up of toughies. Even after all this time, ILO and ILA are hard for me to distinguish, so it'd be tough to be a non-baseball fan today to figure out if RASEN or ROSEN seemed more reasonable.

ADDED NOTE: as reader David Glasser points out, the clue for ILO makes it more fair; an anagram of OIL. But interesting that David's trouble spot was the ROSEN / UNCAS crossing!

But a few gluey spots (TV TAPE is a thing? KGS is usually KG.) is par for the course on a construction like this. Glad to see Matt make his debut with a really fun theme idea and some colorful bonus fill.