ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]
PROGRAM: [Java]
PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ THEMELESS MONDAY]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]
There’s a nice new puzzle that’s been making the blog rounds lately and I believe I’d be remiss if I didn’t chime in myself. Canadian puzzlemaker Les Foeldessy has come up with a breezy twist on the crossword theme called Gryptics. Sure, the name sounds like an unholy beast with the head of a gryphon and the tail of a British crossword. It’s more like along the lines of a fill-in (see sample above). Rules are simple: six words going across, six going down, the givens will help you figure out what each entry is.
It bears repeating, the 6×6 chunk that is the centerpiece of every Gryptic is extremely rarefied air. Look at the crossword I made for today, the NW and SE quadrants are as close as you’ll probably see the ole BEQ get to a 6×6 chunk, and I even failed there with the use of the two cheaters. Yeah, there’s a little bit of “close enough is good enough” going on in the Gryptics as only the 6×6 grid has total interlock The fingers that extend out only serve to help suss out the answers, and as you can see, don’t make words going the other way. Okay MR is an acceptable word, but try using EEOD in a sentence.
As a puzzlemaker I gotta add that it’s great to have puzzles riddled with hardly-ever-used-in-crosswords-but-used-in-everyday-life words. Come on, the shortest entry is six letters long! No OREOs up in these babies. It’s nice to have words like CHOREOGRAPH and COMMUNIQUE instead of the tried-and-true AREA, ARIA, et al. (ETAL?). Anyway, I found the puzzles to be on the easy side, even the so-called hard ones, but who’s counting? Let me say that again: it’s hard to make an entertaining easy puzzle. And for that reason alone, these puzzles are worth mentioning.
Proposal/question: since the fingers are out of the discussion with interlock, why stop with just a 6×6 block? Surely, 7×7, 8×8 or even higher could be pulled off fairly easy, right? I mean, people like Crossword Jesus #2 (Frank Longo) regularly do those oh-holy-fuck/bananas/chunky sections all the time in traditional puzzles. Frank, if you’re reading this, why not pull off an 11×11 Gryptic?
So in short, Les has come up with a fun puzzle book. And if rumors are true, he’s close to bringing these puzzles to a much wider audience. Get a copy of his book here, and you can tell everybody you were there from the beginning. Oh, and share my puzzle. New one on Thursday.
Thats two monday DNF’s in a row. Just dont know the material.
7 minutes to do everything but the NE…8+ minutes to do the NE…
I didn’t recognize either of the Disney or Jersey Shore clues…I must be watching the wrong TV shows.
And having DYKE at 23A didn’t help.
3/4 of it wasn’t too bad. The NW was brutal. It didn’t help that I was sure Bausch & Lomb made Acuvue. BIMBO? :/ Finally googled the soccer captain and the rest fell out. Really wanted GAYBAN for 16A. Oh well.
I wasn’t crazy about “Woman on a board?” for WAHINE. Surfing is too widespread nowadays to indicate a Hawaiian word, IMO. IDK, I might have used, “Woman at Pearl Harbor” – a military mis-direct rather than a corporate one. But it was fun seeing Frank Zappa next to Kiri!
South: Medium
North: F*&^ me, Howard.
OK, #1, Playhouse Disney clues, that’s really seriously freaking harsh.
And #2, anything that begins with the words “Jersey Shore star” that does not evoke Bruce Springsteen is immediate trouble, not to mention an oxymoron. I can say that, at least being a long-time seasonal denizen of the Jersey shore (lowercase ‘s’).
Outside of that stuff, good challenge, and fun long fill. But damn, BEQ, someone dropped some Windex in your coffee for those other ones.
We kid and comment out of respect here.
I hope Julie Foudy starts making the crossword rounds…I got the name off the last three letters. Okay, four letters.
Haven’t heard of the toonie before (ASFAIK) which didn’t help with Mr Kanawa’s first name. Hmm, except it looks like he’s a she and that’s all her last name.
his mama was screaming, his dad was mad.
i had the same experience some others had: bottom half cake, top half root canal. loved it anyway. great mix and range of answers.
TEKANAWA WTF, though.
You know you’ve done way too many crosswords over the years when NEROLI is the way you break into the NW…
And it woulda been slightly less painful if I’d known that JWOWW has that extra, completely superfluous “W”
“extra, completely superfluous” — that described pretty much everything about the cast of that show….
Yeah, this puzzle was way hard.
I tried all the sample Gryptics, and I concur that they were too easy for my taste.
Couldn’t do it. Went with LOONIE and didn’t know the soccer player or SINFONIA. As mentioned, the bottom half was more medium and not a problem. Still, a good workout!