MARCHING BANDS: [ PDF]
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Take five. That is to say, Dan Feyer has now taken five trophies/checks for $5000/titles/scalps of his opponents/you-name-it home with him from the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. This guy’s good. Crazy good. But we knew that already. In fact, we know he’s winning the 2015 ACPT, and the one after that, and the one after that. It’s all over but the bleeding.
Not to say that I didn’t try to make things difficult for Dan et al. About two weeks ago ACPT Tournament director Will Shortz called me up to see what I was doing. Turns out that a video ole’ Dubya Ess had taped for Business Insider lingered a little too long on the solution to the previously accepted and scheduled puzzle #5 for 2014 ACPT (check the 0:23 mark in that clip). So, he was in a pinch and asked if I could come up with a theme for the five spot.
For those who already compete, you know the drill. Puzzle #5 is supposed to slaughter the room. The theme is gonna be (a) hard, (b) probably something you haven’t seen before and (c) clued in a way that is borderline impossible but somehow fair. Let’s put it this way: I write puzzles for a living. Coming up with themes is part of the job and since I do my job pretty well, I’m generating themes all the time. But to come up with something fits the criteria listed above is a lot more demanding. Well, I was up for the challenge and since I think of my most creative ideas when I’m moving around, I put on my walking shoes and left the condo.
About a half hour later I had come up, with what I had felt, was a breathtaking #5 concept. In fact, I was so giddy, I couldn’t wait to show somebody, and in this instance it was my wife Liz. After dinner I explained to her what my concept was, in crisp, clear, easy-to-understand English. After she heard it, she just looked at me like I had nine heads. It made no sense to her. So I showed a mock-up on a blank grid. And after carefully explaining it again, she came up with a better adjustment to the idea to make it flow more nicely. Bang! We were in business. So I finished the mock-up and emailed it to Will.
The next morning he wrote back and asked what else I had.
Well, I was crushed. I just couldn’t shake that, to my mind, this truly axis-shifting theme wasn’t ACPT-worthy. In fact it took me a very very long time to recover. I sent him pitch number 2, but it was too similar to other puzzles. Panic started to kick in, and I began IM-ing wtih my buddy Ben Zimmer. We developed an idea and that was sent in for rejection as well. Then the anxiety really set in. I flipped through my phone app version of Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies.” That’s a deck of playing cards designed to help with writer’s block. Nothing helped. After pouring through old issues of puzzle magazines and various reference books in search of inspiration, I pitched three more ideas, all rejected.
I wouldn’t say all of these are bad, per se. One of them will be a future New York Times puzzle, hopefully two. Another will be a future AVCX puzzle. One was already a blog puzzle. And the other two should never again be seen by human eyes.
So that means it was the seventh idea that finally worked. I thought that I might like to play with the idea of deliberately putting in duplicates into a grid. (That’s a crossword no no, if you’ve got ATE in the puzzle, you can’t put EAT or anything else like it). After a while, I turned to the cryptic crossword staple, the container clue, where one word is in another. For example, RAKE in MARSH spells MARRAKESH. And to make it 5-worthy, I thought to cross the word RAKE over MARRAKESH and just pretend the word didn’t exist in the long answer. That is to say MARRAKESH was going to be clued {Crane’s location} cluing MARSH and you had to realize that RAKE was duplicated in the word and you were to ignore it. Boom. We had a winner. Made a wide-open grid to boot, took a day to write the hardest clues I could think of and then it was off to the big boss man.
One week before the Tournament I saw the test version of the puzzle. Will had, in my mind, given away the game. The long clue answers brought to everyone’s attention the crossing words. The clue now read {Crane’s location + 36-Down = African tourist destination}. When I saw that I wasn’t too pleased. The way it was clued it was more of a Tuesday-level puzzle instead of the back-breaker a 5 was supposed to be. The whole point of the theme was that you had to figure out the dupes crossed themselves and you were to ignore them in the theme answers. So, we shouldn’t call attention to them! The next morning I called him up and proposed a better title and blurb that clearly indicated what the game was. Title: “Send in the clones” (that is to say, we’re adding duplicated words in the long answers) Blurb: “Watch out for some double-crossers! They may sneak in when you’re not looking” (read: note the crossing dupes and they’re altering the grid somehow). We both loved it and he changed it on the spot.
Only thing is, nobody got around to test-solving the changed version. Nobody. All of Will’s testers saw the earlier version. When Will told me this just before the puzzle was about to handed out at the Tournament I got a little nervous. Surely, the top solvers would get it, but how long would it take? I stood behind Dan Feyer and watched him. There were long stretches where he just stopped and tapped his eraser on the page. I watched the clock. Four minutes had passed. Then five. Then six. Nothing. Seven. It was getting ridiculous. Dan Feyer destroys larger puzzles in less time than this. Eight. Still nothing. Then at the nine minute mark both Dan and Tyler Hinman had finished. Whew. It was solveable.
As for the rest of the room? I think people are stil working on it. The judges who were correcting papers sat around for 15 minutes doing nothing waiting for the first batch of papers. Then the top solvers puzzles came in and they were checked in no time. Then. Nothing for another 15 minutes when the remaining 550 contestant’s papers came in after time ran out. Wow. Hopefully, you don’t hate me so much after that one.
So, for an act of atonement, here’s an easy one. This was a Marching Bands puzzle I made for the Friday night events. If you like this puzzle, please consider pre-ordering up a copy of my Marching Bands book. There will be 42 puzzles just like this one.
Share the puzzle. New one on Thursday.
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