FRIDAY’S PUZZLE — Ah, double quad stacks in a puzzle that I, myself, was divided on. How appropriate. Don’t panic, Martin Ashwood-Smith and Joe Krozel: I liked your puzzle for the most part, but I’m going to use it to make a point.
A philosophical discussion between constructors has gone on for longer than I can remember about what quad stacks do to the fill in a puzzle and whether it’s worth it in terms of the relative enjoyment that a solver gets from working a grid with words (or semi-words that are impossible to clue well) like TERNES, TENTER, A MAN, ENCE and STER in it. When you are gingerly trying to stack 15-letter Across entries like you’re building a house of cards, sometimes bad things happen to the Down fill. A constructor gets left with very few choices, unless he or she is willing to rip the whole thing out and start again. The idea that if something is in the dictionary it is a legitimate entry only gets you so far before it becomes apparent that you’ve forgotten the audience for whom you are making the puzzle.
Here’s the thing: when someone sits down to solve a crossword puzzle, they’re looking to have a good time. It’s a game. No doubt, it’s a devilishly tricky high wire act on the part of the constructor and the editor, trying to push the envelope in terms of the format, making a Friday puzzle difficult enough to challenge the diehards, and still have something for everyone in it. But if you feel let down by the fill more than once or twice in a puzzle, then you just have to ask out loud if it’s worth it. Who is this puzzle for?
Hang on tight. This is where the whiplash comes in.
My personal opinion is that there is a place for such puzzles in the rotation once in a while, especially when you have some great entries like ADELAIDE’S LAMENT, SATELLITE STATES, SACRIFICIAL LAMB, AM I GLAD TO SEE YOU, SLUG IT OUT and ANTS IN ONE’S PANTS. There are people who don’t even like seeing the pronoun ONE’S in an entry phrase, but I don’t mind it if it’s in a fun entry. Enjoyment of puzzle fill is a very subjective thing.
And, besides the fun entries above, there is some very interesting cluing in this puzzle. Even though the Sea of AZOV has appeared many times in The New York Times crossword puzzle perhaps it will resonate all the more given the world news recently about Crimea. Some of you may have filled in MILLI wondering why it was not clued to the defunct musical duo MILLI Vanilli. I would speculate that a clue like that would have been too easy for a Friday puzzle. And Clue of the Day for me was 48 Across’s “Sol mates?” for LAS.
Let’s see what Mr. Ashwood-Smith and Mr. Krozel have to say:
Constructors’ Notes:
Martin Ashwood-Smith: I like to think of today’s double-quad-stack puzzle as having a long-lost triple stack little brother from 1996. Do you see any similarity between the grids? In reality, any similarity is just a coincidence, but an intriguing one, nonetheless.
When I started constructing the top stacks for this puzzle, I though it would be fun to use a 15-letter word/phrase that is commonly seen at the very bottom of stacked puzzles: SATELLITE STATES, and placing it at 1-Across, at the very top. In this position, its abundance of low-point (useful word-ending) Scrabble letters, normally an advantage, would be all but useless.
After I finished what looked like a promising top stack, I then contacted my friend Joe Krozel to see if he had an “orphan” stack or two that we could meld into a finished puzzle. By luck he did. Our first draft had 10-D SLUG, and FAIN in its mirror position. Luckily we were able to open the grid up more (and reduce the word count to 66) by extending both entries to SLUG IT OUT and SAMMY FAIN. We got lucky that day!
Joe Krozel: When constructing my first dual quad-stack puzzle around 2010, I assembled a library of half-filled grids containing a single quad stack at the top or the bottom. So I had numerous potential matches when Martin presented his upper quad stack to me; I just had to search my library for the closest matches, then Martin and I would move squares around to unite the two puzzle halves with the proper symmetry.
I started the lower quad stack with the lively seed entry AM I GLAD TO SEE YOU. The vowels at the front and back ensured that 55-D and 60-D would be words rather than some all-consonant letter strings like SSSS or SSTS.
It’s been a brutal winter here on the East Coast, and a person could and did develop a cold. Adelaide is talking about her frustration with Nathan Detroit, but let’s listen to her version:
Your thoughts?
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