A well-constructed but incredibly difficult puzzle for me today. Josh ventures outside his usual oeuvre with a relatively low ...
read moreA well-constructed but incredibly difficult puzzle for me today. Josh ventures outside his usual oeuvre with a relatively low word-count grid. Sixty-four words is a tough, tough task. It's nowhere near the record for fewest words, but it's verging on it. The huge challenge for these types of puzzles is making them work without too many glue entries while still incorporating a lot of snazzy stuff. Often times you can make one or more subsections sing, but another area gets so constrained that you have to lean on a piece of crosswordese to get the full grid to knit together.
The right half of the puzzle is just amazing. I love how Josh fills such goodness as VOODOO DOLL and ROBERT E LEE and the bizarre GLASS ONION, and yet manages to escape with virtually no ugliness. I bet he tested out using cheater squares, not using them, moving them around, using extra pairs, etc. to figure out how to make the grid more fillable even before starting. The end result is fantastic.
The left half is also quite good, but it doesn't look as nice when held up to the right. I can just see the filling process in the SW, coming in with such cleanliness and even the jazzy HOT TUBS… and then running into the very last bit. AWHIRL is a real word, but I imagine some solvers will see it as unsightly. I'm perfectly fine with it by itself, as it gets over a million hits on Google, and I can imagine older-style writers utilizing it. But when combined with the awkward O WOE partial, it doesn't hold up to the rest of the super-solid puzzle.
A similar result happens in the north section, where everything works so beautifully... until you run into the awkward DELS. A perfectly fine piece of glue, as is SSN, but both in conjunction stand out amid the rest of the super-clean work. Themeless construction can be so frustrating when one corner turns out beautifully but the symmetrical corner refuses to cooperate to the same level.
Overall, a really hard workout — puzzles with longer-than-average words tend to be harder to find toeholds to start the solving process — and great execution, with just a couple of tiny flaws.