Tom Bachant author page
1 puzzle by Tom Bachant
with Jeff Chen comments
See the 1 answer word debuted by Tom Bachant.
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★ There's a reason Will Shortz listed Joanne Sullivan's LAND FORMS puzzle as one of his favorites in an old collection. Each shape looks exactly like you might imagine, and there's so much variety. Will might consider today's puzzle if he assembled a sequel to that 2011 book. The astronomer in me stared into the night sky of today's grid for hours.
I especially loved ASTEROID in its spotted pattern. Took me a minute to figure out why that was appropriate, but once I remembered their porosity, it made all the sense in the universe.
ASTEROID was doubly impressive, given how hard it can be to fill around fixed circles in diagonal patterns. Working with eight of them in a checkerboard is like trying to dodge a doomsday meteor strike. Smart to isolate this into a corner, where you can shift the entire thing to the left or downward without having it affect the rest of the grid. Such a smooth result, with an OREO THIN treat to boot.
COMET on the opposite side is also tough to grid around, but EPEES, ERAT, NEMEA isn't worthy of an ARG! shout. It's all worth the price of BIG DUMMY, for this big dummy, at least.
I would have loved a spiral GALAXY instead of a circular one. That's too much to ask out of six letters, but maybe two arms out of SPIRAL and GALAXY? Alternatively, an ellipse could have been more evocative.
Puzzles that strike me with their visual awe come around roughly as frequently as Halley's COMET. Stellar debut!