Alan Olschwang author page

An impressive number of grid-spanners in today's construction, the likes I haven't seen for quite a while. Not just a triple-stack going down the center, but two more in the down direction plus three more in across. Eight 15's in one themeless — that's pretty cool to see.

Typically with this many grid-spanning entries, some (or more than some) are just so-so, but Alan has picked some beauties. ANDROMEDA STRAIN didn't come easy due to its opaque clue, but wow, what a nice entry. And all three in the triple-stack are really nice. I didn't know THE NOONDAY DEVIL and when I tried to research it, only a few links came up. Perhaps I'm missing a cult classic? In any case, by my count, seven out of eight winners is a great slugging percentage.

As with most themeless puzzles highlighting lots of 15's, there will be a good number of shorter entries. I typically gloss over the four and five-letter stuff, but the threes sometimes stick in my craw, and with 24, they did seem to be ubiquitous. Not that any of them are terrible, but as a whole, I IN plus MDL and others made the puzzle feel slightly shaky at points. The clues for many of the shorties were awfully hard, so overall it made the entire puzzle a real challenge for me.

I really appreciated that Alan didn't stop just at the eight 15's, but integrated two very nice eights (BBC RADIO and THE SLOTS), plus IN THE WILD and PHASING IN. Because he was at 70 words, Alan could have split up one of those pairs to make a 72-word puzzle, but I like the added zing of the long fill.

Finally, with any triple stack, the crossing answers are bound to have some rocky places. Really only ROTOS was troubling for me — anytime you have to use "Old" or "outdated" in a clue it's a sign that maybe the entry isn't so good — but Alan does give us a pretty cool construction; three grid-spanners intersecting a triple-stack is no mean feat.

All in all, a puzzle that stretches for an ambitious goal, paying the price of a good handful of not-great filler material. I admire the strive to do something which pushes the boundaries. And a big congrats to Alan for hitting his 10th NYT puzzle, which qualifies him for our list of most published constructors.

It is hard to create a Sunday puzzle. Working with a 21x21 grid and a maximum of 140 almost always causes me to tear my hair out (what's left of it, anyway). Each time I've dabbled with 138 word grids I've shied away, going back to the safety of the 140 worder. That goes doubly or triply so for the 136 word construction, which is exponentially harder to execute on. Today, Alan gives us a 134 word puzzle today, one of the lowest word count puzzles in the Shortz era. Audacious!

The theme is straightforward today, five well-known "bye-lines", phrases famous people said as they were leaving. Clever title. I liked the idea paired with the title and would have liked to see a few more theme examples. I'LL BE BACK comes to mind immediately, as does GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK. I'm sure there are others. Fun to think of famous parting words.

This puzzle falls into the category of Will's experimentation with less theme density and a lower word count. 134 words is pretty impressive, but I for one don't care about record setting unless it leads directly to solver pleasure. So does this puzzle achieve that? On some levels, yes. The fact that the puzzle includes so much long fill is impressive, and that factor can really add to puzzle enjoyment. There's a lot of good stuff here, including IPOD NANO, IN UTERO, PLAYS UP, BAD TRIP, SURF CITY, SET BAIL, RAT TAILS, even IDI AMIN in his full. Pretty fun to see all that snazzy content.

However, a lot of the fill is in that 3-7 letter length, and much of that isn't exciting, more "ballast fill"; glue that holds the puzzle together. I enjoyed the idea of the theme and uncovering some of the longer fill, but encountering entries such as EPATHA, especially crossing ASAS took away from my solving pleasure. Also, I felt like I was solving a giant themeless puzzle, which could be great except that I personally get tired out mentally toward the end of a hard themeless without many marquee answers. Stretching that experience into a 21x dimension left me awfully worn-out toward the end.

Overall, interesting experiment with the "less theme, less words" approach. Seeing a few examples of this has helped tune my impression of what I would like to see in the future: at least six theme entries (or five grid-spanners), with more 8+ letter fill. I think it would be awesome to get a few more puzzles which aren't as theme-dense as usual, but offer more of the impact that snazzy themelesses deliver what with their fresh stacks of 8+ letter entries.

FYI, if you hit the "Analyze this puzzle" button at the very bottom of this page, you'll get all sorts of stats about this puzzle. No more drudgery of counting things manually!