Hilariously, I chose the solving music for this puzzle before realizing that it has, in fact, been a pretty long time! My last solo puzzle here was back in January, so I figure my birthday is a good day to return from unintentional hiatus. Also, it's my birthday today!
I've actually still been making puzzles for the blog, but cluing and setting up blog posts takes more effort than my brain likes to let me use, so I still don't expect to be posting frequently anytime soon, but maybe I'll dig up the unclued blog puzzles I have lying around and finally get to posting them. I actually have a Rows Garden and a Marching Bands lying around too, but I'm not sure if I'm happy enough with them to post them; you'll see them soon enough if I decide to share them after all.
Another collab today! Brooke Husic reached out to me after the reveal trailer for the new Pokémon games dropped recently, asking if I wanted to collab on a demi seeded with 17-Across; she sent me a half-filled grid and I obviously had to help out with the rest. Brooke's ability to write ridiculously good tough clues is always amazing to me, and I think some of that energy spread into my own clues for this grid; this was a hella fun collab, and hopefully we can make some more puzzles for y'all in the future. Hope you guys enjoy!
Okay, lesson learned: never promise any kind of consistency ever, lest I take another three months to post a new puzzle.
Pretty glad to finally be done with this one; I very much put off writing clues for this, so having this be over with is a good weight off my shoulders, even if I'm a little salty that my favorite entry in this puzzle got sniped by Sam Ezersky in Saturday's NYT :)
Hahahahaha yeah so I haven't posted a puzzle since August I guess? Whoops! Hopefully this puzzle is so good that it makes it look like I spent the last 2 months making it. Not that I'd be posting very often otherwise, but I recently got a new job that is taking a good chunk of my time away, so crosswords may be a little scarcer here, but I'll make an effort to keep putting stuff out, even if it's this sporadic.
Pretty happy with this one; it's got more than a few glimpses into my rapidly eroding psyche (read: obscenely long clues), so I hope y'all enjoy it.
It's another puzzle! I can't remember the last time I had two puzzles drop this close to each other; this might be the first time that's happened since the first week of the blog. This one's just a regular themeless; I seeded with 34-Across, which I have a feeling may have been used before, but this was a cluing angle I desperately wanted to use. This is a 72-worder, but hopefully the interlocking 15s make up for the lack of longer fill. Hope you guys enjoy!
Long time no puzzle! Here's a themeless idea I've had floating around for a while, and finally made happen this week. (Little disclaimer: this is another one of those "basically a themeless but there's a gimmicky thing going on" puzzles; you'll see.)
Solving music for this week's post is my newly released mashup EP, RHYthm! It's been in the works for a few months now (and is a big reason for the delay between puzzles on the blog this time). It's available for free over on Bandcamp as well; there's a link in the description of the YouTube video embedded above.
Enjoy the puzzle, and good luck to everyone participating in Lollapuzzoola tomorrow! We'll probably be arranging some fun and games over in Crosscord after the tournament tomorrow; link below if you want to join the server. Hope to see you there!
Note for applet and PUZ solvers: the solution grid is not included in the puzzle file (the encoded solution is just a grid full of Xs), so the program won't show your solution as correct. Feel free to Google any answers you're unsure of; the solution grid will be provided in the blog post for the next puzzle.
Solving Music: The War On Drugs - Under The Pressure
It's time for a meta contest! Solve the puzzle above and work out what the meta answer is, and submit it for a chance to win a one-year subscription to Crucinova, a newer outlet for unconventional crosswords. My guess (which may be *way* off) is that the meta will only be moderately tricky; solving the puzzle itself may prove more difficult. Here are the details:
TO SUBMIT: Send the meta answer to my email (rickycruzmedia@gmail.com) by 11:59 PM Pacific Time on Monday, July 19th, and provide some information to show you understand the mechanic and that you didn't just guess the answer (it can be as simple as "X part of the meta was cool/weird/bad/interesting/sensual", as long as it's clear that you get it). Put something like META CONTEST ENTRY in the subject line, that way your entry doesn't get lost in my inbox. It'd be appreciated if you included a name you'd like to go by in the event you win; I plan on announcing the name of the winner, but if you want to be anonymous or something, just let me know. If you want to be notified some way other than email in the event you win, let me know that as well.
I'll send a reply to all entries to verify that I've received them (said email will not confirm whether or not the solution is correct); if it's been a day or so and I haven't replied, email me again or DM me on Twitter (link below), and I'll make sure your entry is counted.
The winner will be selected randomly from the pool of correct entries received before the deadline. Only the first submission I receive from each entrant will be accepted, so make sure you're confident about your answer before you send it in!
STREAMERS: I'm totally cool with (and encourage!) streaming this and working out the meta solution on-stream with chat. If someone is watching a stream and decides they want to enter the contest, even if they didn't work out all of the solution themselves, that's totally fine by me. As long as nobody's publicly posting hints or a completed grid, I'm gonna be pretty lax with submissions; I trust y'all to play fair.
Again, I won't be verifying correct meta solutions by email, so if you don't want to enter proper (because of course you're already subscribed to Crucinova), but want to know if your meta guess is correct, please wait for the results to be posted, and don't submit a formal entry (though emails complimenting my Escherian meta constructing skills are always welcome). I'm also open to gifting the subscription to someone else, if that's something that interests you.
That should do it for all the details! I'll post any clarifications and updates over on my Twitter; if you have any questions, feel free to DM me there, comment below (no spoilers!), or shoot me an email. The meta solution will be included in the blog post for the next puzzle, which *should* be on Tuesday. Good luck everyone, and enjoy the puzzle!
Really happy with how this one came out; I wanted to construct and didn't have my laptop with me, so this puzzle was gridded entirely on paper. Always nice to flex the manual filling muscle; a lot of autofill softens that skillset, and it's good to build it back up.
I seeded this with 4-Down; such a fun entry, and the letters are too good to pass up. The rest of this fill worked itself out fairly smoothly and allowed for some really fun fill, though there are a couple of gluey bits that I think are worth it. Cluing is pretty brutal this time, especially in the northwest, unless you know a lot of niche stuff (the usual here, really). Hope y'all enjoy.
Solving Music: Powfu - mario kart (feat. Travis Barker)
Welcome to Cruzzles sudoku! I've been posting most of my sudoku puzzles in
the
Cracking the Cryptic Discord server, and it's about time I start posting them here as well.
This puzzle was
made the other day for a speed-setting contest in the CTC server; we were
given the Liar Killer and Missing Arrow rulesets to work with, and had 70
minutes to put together a sudoku. This puzzle got 2nd place, and I'm quite
proud of it. Hope y'all enjoy it too!
If you like this one, the winning
puzzle by TotallyNormalCat is absolutely fantastic as well; you can solve it
here (rules
are the same as this puzzle).
If you're into the whole variant sudoku thing, you may have already seen
Simon solve my puzzle Bubble Bath on Cracking the Cryptic earlier this week;
give the video a watch if you haven't! (There's a solving link in the video
description as well if you'd like to take a crack at it before you watch.)
Solving Music: Carly Rae Jepsen - Making The Most Of The Night
TALL. PUZZLE. TALL. PUZZLE. TALL. PUZZLE.
I had an idea to make a themeless with super funky dimensions, and it came out about as well as I expected. Somehow the funny long grid made the prospect of doing two quad stacks of 9-letter entries less daunting; they could definitely be improved, but I'm pretty glad this turned out okay at all.
Puzzles here have been coming pretty slowly lately (purely because I'm not making them nearly as often as I used to), so I'm giving a lot more consideration to the idea I had a while back of posting sudoku and other logic puzzles on this blog. It's a different target audience, but I figure there's probably some overlap. If you're at all interested in seeing sudoku on this blog, leave a comment and let me know. I don't think I'll be able to embed anything into a blog post, but I should be able to provide a link to solve on F-Puzzles, and it should increase activity on the blog. Maybe that's good for metrics or something, idk.
Wanted to screw around with grid shapes again and put together this stagger-stack of nine 7s; kinda wanna try more really weird stacks like this in the future. Not a fan of how the NW and SE corners end up very closed off from the rest of the grid, but I'm pretty happy with this all things considered. Hope y'all enjoy.
You'll notice that there's no Across Lite or PDF links for this puzzle. You'll also notice that the grid in the applet is absolutely terrifying to look at. This puzzle is meant to be solved in the applet, so I've decided to leave out the links this time.
It's pretty difficult to talk about this puzzle without spoiling the revealer/theme, so I'm gonna openly talk puzzle spoilers (and explain the theme if you're out of the loop) below this break:
Solving Music: Vaudeville Revival - Meanwhile at Saddle Ranch!
It's that time again: SUNDAY SIZE THEMELESS TIME, baby.
Some entries in my themeless seed list are there because I have a sick cluing angle for them (these are usually left out of my publicly available seed list unless I think the entry itself is cool enough to warrant being a seed in its own right). 63-Across in this puzzle is one of those entries. Last time I did one of these, I tried throwing some seeds in a pinwheel shape, but this time I went for a modified version of a center stack with a 21 running down the middle and used entries from my seed list wherever the opportunity presented itself. 21x themelesses are cool like that; there's so much more space to play with in terms of grid structure than in a standard 15x, where you usually end up with some form of stacks in the corners, maybe the center, and a few other nice long entries thrown in.
I threw some image clues in this time to spice things up for applet solvers (I also set a quick 65-Down puzzle just so I could use it for its own image clue; if those are your thing, there's a solving link in that clue).
Been a while since we've done a nice stagger-stack, so here's one I'm happy with! Seeded this one with 36-Across; I've been getting into chess videos a good amount (despite being pretty garbage at it), and this entry was too good to pass up.
I'm also experimenting with multimedia clues on this one; the browser applet has a video clue for 20-Down; I'll probably be doing other clues like that in the future. I tried making that clue a pure audio clue, but there's nowhere I can host an audio file that'll be compatible with the applet, so I decided to edit that video together.
Not really an announcement, but a reminder for anyone who isn't already aware: the Boswords Spring Themeless League is still going on, and if you're in Crosscord, we have a channel for talking about the league puzzles. Swing by if you're taking part!
Enjoy the puzzle! I've also just finished gridding another 21x21 themeless, so after that gets clued, it'll probably be up here in the coming week. Stay tuned! 👀
EDIT 3/20: This puzzle originally cited the wrong artist in the clue for 36-Down; this has been fixed in the applet, PUZ, and PDF. Let me know if those didn't update or anything.
Wow, it's been a hot minute since we've had a themeless here, let alone any
puzzles. Let's fix that. I've been busy with a lot of jobs; I'm working on a
couple of graphic design commissions for other constructors, and, in relevant
news, I've been cluing my puzzle for the
Boswords Spring Themeless League, which is gonna be starting up soon! The preseason puzzle is coming up this
Monday, and the league starts on March 1st, so there's still a good amount of
time to sign up! There are so many good constructors making puzzles, so y'all
should get on that if you can.
Additionally, there are a few collab puzzles that have been in the works
for a while, so hopefully some of those will be coming out in the next couple
of weeks. Along with some other puzzles that are coming along, I'm hoping
March will be a lot busier here than February's been.
New themed puzzle! Some advice as well: you are way better off staying out of social media right now. Just keep a news broadcast open to stay informed, and make the most of today. And of course, today more than most, enjoy the puzzle!
Happy New Year! It's a very aptly-timed puzzle this time. The theme is gonna be a tricky one, so hopefully you can manage it. Some of the fill might be a little iffy but y'all should understand why when you get what's going on. Sacrifices had to be made to be able to escape the Hell Year, so I figure it warrants a crossword. Enjoy the puzzle!
Wanted to try a funky grid shape for this one; I've been interested in trying to make themeless grids with classic themeless structures in the wrong places, and this attempt at stagger stacks outside the center is the first that's panned out. I've been tempted to try a triple-stack of 9s in the middle (which would force two 3x3 areas of blocks on the sides), so maybe you'll see a grid with that layout soon. Probably worth noting that this puzzle is a bit name-heavy, but the crossings should all be fairly gettable. If not, then good luck!
In other news, if any of you are avid Cracking the Cryptic viewers, you'll probably have heard about the Modern Art Puzzle Pack made by the CTC Discord server. I have a sudoku in that pack! It's available for free over on the CTC Patreon page; go check out all the amazing logic puzzles if you get the chance!
(This is from the new Aesop Rock album, Spirit World Field Guide, which just came out this past week; HIGHLY recommend listening to the whole thing)
Really happy with the center stack on this one; all three of the entries in that stack are ones I've been trying to get in a puzzle for a while, so it's pretty sick how it ended up working. Enjoy the puzzle!
Small change to blog posts, btw: I'll no longer be including a solution image at the bottom of the post to simplify the blog post process on my end. If you're a PDF solver, you can easily check the solution by revealing the puzzle in the PuzzleMe applet in the post. If that creates any issues, go ahead and comment to let me know; I'm happy to keep including the solution images if they're still needed.
(The colored squares aren't necessary for the theme, so feel free to solve in
Across Lite)
Solving Music: Hachioji-P, Giga - Gimme×Gimme
Really happy that this puzzle panned out at all, to be honest. The theme felt
like it wasn't going to all tie together, but I managed to find some theme
entries that fit together! Even if the theme isn't lost on you, check out the
solution image on this one; you'll get to see the proper formatting and
everything.
