ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ WOW]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ WOW]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
People are surprised when I tell them how much more difficult it is to make an easy puzzle than a hard one. Anybody who’s intertwined groups of longer words over a massive area of white space will tell you that hard puzzles aren’t easy to construct. But because they are already supposed to be hard, you can get away with more, shall we say “liberties.”
An easy puzzle should have a new-ish theme that isn’t so out-there that tyros can understand what’s going on. It also cannot have any obscure words in the fill. That means all the Eastern European rivers, Greek gods, and lines from e. e. cummings poems are strictly verboten. Oh, and it’s somehow supposed to be fun. All add up to a hard task to pull off.
The easiest puzzle to make is a Wednesday puzzle. (For the uninitiated, a puzzle’s difficulty is generally graded by the day it would appear in The New York Times. That is to say Mondays are easy, and the puzzle gradually gets harder untill we reach the WTFF? insanely tough Saturdays.) A Wednesday has a theme that might not be on the tricky side, but it’s got those pesky opera singers and silent movie actresses in the fill. Not a whole lot of them, but one or two of them that are holding the whole damn grid together.
And it’s a real dillema too. As a constructor, we constantly ask ourselves is this fill better with all these colorful phrases using eye-poppingly high-scoring Scrabble letters but one awful Southern Hemisphere constellation? Or should we play it safe with the other fill with nothing too fancy, but nothing offensive either?
Sometimes in my case, I might have thrown something too outré for the average solver but not for those in-the-know (MOS DEF, perfect example). Yet that rapper’s appearance suddenly thrusts an otherwise wonderful Monday puzzle into the Tuesday or Wednesday category. (Editor depending, mind you).
The easy puzzles are always mentioned with scorn amongst puzzlemakers. “If it isn’t oh-holy-fuck hard, it’s not worth making or solving,” most say. And it’s true. I love making the really, really, nasty hard ones. And feel especially proud of myself when I’ve made a theme that makes you feel like you needed to be tripping on acid to figure it out.
But the majority of solvers really just want easy puzzles. It’s why so many markets have such crappy puzzles. Rote exercises of strict vocabulary without any of the fun stuff. Puns, ambiguities and neologisms have no place in these puzzles.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I’m hoping with some of these puzzles that I’ve posted (including the one above) are entertaining enough for the seasoned veterans, yet not-so-scary so the newbies can finish them and realize how they’ve been wasting their time doing all the boring ones.
While Wendy O. Williams jumped out at me – I was a huge fan in the early ’80s – I’d guess that many wouldn’t consider her name to be easy fill. I loved it, though. I can be counted among the lovers of “oh-holy-fuck hard” puzzles, so finding something as offbeat as Wendy in an easy puzzle was an unexpected treat.
I’ve never heard of WORLD OF WARCRAFT.
Is it a movie?
i dig this puzzle, although i have never heard of WENDY O WILLIAMS. (i do know who chichikov is. well, i don’t know who posted that, but i know that chichikov is the protagonist of my favorite 19th-century comic novel.) and when i was a kid, bernie KOSAR was my favorite football player. i kid you not. i even cheered for the browns because of him.
i made a monday puzzle once, but it’s not clear if i could do it again. my tastes in fill have changed to the point where i’m rather unwilling to remove the “good stuff” for the sake of monday-smoothness. i tried to make another a monday a few weeks ago and my wife (who’s a wednesday solver) couldn’t finish it. um, oops?
I hadn’t heard of WENDY O WILLIAMS either. Matt – WORLD OF WARCRAFT is an massive-multiplayer online role playing game. Never played it myself, but I’ve got some cousins who are addicted, so it fell it right easily.
I guess I like making Monday type puzzles because I don’t like having ETUI & its pals all over my puzzles. At the same time, I haven’t developed my skills enough yet to start stacking 8-letter words, so as it is, I prefer to liven up my fill through the clues, which works nicely for crosswords for my school’s paper. That’s my idea of a fun puzzle to make, for now I guess. Maybe I’ll grow out of it eventually, but I’m fine with constructing a Monday puzzle. 🙂
Wendy hit her peak when I was in college at UW-Madison. I think she played there a couple times. Nice puzzle–Amazing that you can knock these out so quickly, but that’s experience and smarts, isn’t it?
I appreciate the effort and have done them all so far, great job!
“Easy” is a really subjective thing– I anticipated WORLD OF WARCRAFT as soon as I got the theme, but just gave up and Googled “Queen of Shock Rock.” Still, I noticed a few gimmes like IRATE.
The site’s still loading verrrry slowly for me at times. One Java puzzle crashed on me, and today’s took about fifteen minutes longer than it would have on paper. Anyone else having this problem?
Hm, works much faster on my laptop.
Also, this puzzle contains a link to a two-year-old GigaOM article for no reason that I can discern…
I find your puzzles very enjoyable and gettable though difficult as I think I am a Way Older Woman than you cater to (I’m (gulp) 49).
Many of the Names/Musical references are out of my league, but I’ll learn them, just as I once learned —–Verdugo.(Elena)
Keep up the good work.
I think solvers aren’t looking for easy puzzles, but for puzzles they can solve completely. And of course “easy” is a subjective thing.
If you can make the solver work a little and finally achieve completion correctly, that’s the best AHA for him. So the constructor’s job is knowing pretty accurately what most people know or don’t know. One way to find out is to tune in to “Jeopardy!”!
johnson,
I have underwear older than you. I’ll be 64 in 2 weeks but I like to think of myself as “Young at Heart”, a song recorded by Frank Sinatra (remember him?).
Brendan, could you fit the band “Blue October” into one of your puzzles? My son went to high school with some of the members and they could use the publicity. I’m not above crass commercialism.
Count me in the ‘tough but getable’ category. I would say that Oswalt certainly counts as culturally relevant, but then again since I know him, I WOULD say that. Keep on keepin’ on, bro.