Surprise! I’m breaking my “new puzzle every other Saturday” rule by publishing on an off-week, and also on a Friday. I wrote the New York Times puzzle for tomorrow, so I figured, why not have two? My schedule will get back to normal beginning next week — meaning, there will be a new puzzle on March 1, then on March 15, and so on.
Today’s puzzle is a metapuzzle. If you’ve never solved a metapuzzle before, here’s how it works: you solve the crossword as you normally would, and when you’re done, you have to find a specific word or phrase which fits a pattern hidden in the puzzle. For example, if the longest entries in a puzzle hid the words SIGHT, SMELL, SOUND, and TASTE inside them, then the answer to the meta would probably be TOUCH. It’s basically a puzzle within a puzzle. Matt Gaffney is a master at creating these things, and he runs a weekly meta contest which you should definitely check out. Matt has also written a good primer on how to solve metapuzzles which you can read here.
And if you’d like some extra meta contest goodness, check out fellow indie puzzler Neville Fogarty’s offering here.
So that’s that. Oh, and I’m tossing in a prize, too. One randomly selected winner will receive a Devil Cross t-shirt…..which I haven’t designed yet. But it’ll be cool! And in the right size. Because a life goal of mine is to put my website on your chest.
The answer to this contest puzzle is a bygone TV show which has since been adapted to the big screen. Please submit your answer to me (devilcrosswords@gmail.com) by 6 pm on Friday, February 28. Only one answer per entrant, please — so make sure you’ve got it right before hitting “Send.”
Enjoy!
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A lot can change in five years. I recently unearthed this little gem, the very first 15×15 crossword I ever built in January 2009:
Just look at that piece of horribleness. It’s got such timeless entries like SACA! A BANE! IPH! EMO DO! EARPS! SHI! ARAU! ALALA! APHIS! UPL! KCI! CONISTRA! SIR SLAM! TACO RICE! ASIAN CHIMES! DEATH SPIRAL TRAPS! Even NLER is in the grid, but that looks good by comparison. And can you believe I went to the trouble to clue the puzzle? I did. DEATH SPIRAL TRAPS was [Financial vortexes which are hard to escape?]. EMO DO was [Punk rock coif?]. I combined SIR SLAM with A LOT in the northwest corner as a reference to SIR SLAM-A-LOT, an obscure, old Detroit Pistons mascot.
At least I had the good sense not to submit that puzzle anywhere. It’s like a greatest hits collection, if every hit on it was “The Macarena” looped for 24 hours straight. But the point is, every crossword constructor goes through that beginning phase when you don’t know what you’re doing — when you don’t have the software, don’t know which references to consult, and don’t know what makes a good puzzle. Well, it’s possible the three Crossword Jesuses as defined by Brendan Emmett Quigley came out of the womb building fresh and fun grids, but I certainly didn’t. Hell, as you can see, I built that first grid using the Insert Table option in Microsoft Word.
I’ve gotten much better at this whole puzzle thing in the last five years. My grids have certainly gotten sassier, if not classier.
Enjoy today’s puzzle — there should be a new one on March 1. Be sure and check out next Saturday’s New York Times puzzle. That one will be from yours truly.
(Oh, and if you’d like to receive an e-mail reminder about Devil Cross puzzles, join the Google Group here.)
Update, 2/15/14 @ 11:45 pm: An astute commenter (simpsonsfan) pointed out that I had a typo in the clue for 57-Down. I’ve since corrected it. Sorry about that.
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