Last week’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament at the Brooklyn Marriott was great, as always. I brought a whole stack of printed Devil Cross puzzles and put them on one of the tables in the hotel lobby in between one of the rounds, and much to my amazement, they were all gone when I came back. I figured that either other solvers took them to solve, or some Marriott employee found them lying around and threw them away. Here’s hoping it was the former.

As for the tourney itself, I finished in 187th place out of nearly 600, which is my best finish thus far. Just a little more practice — say, solving 100,000 more puzzles and learning how to upload directly to my head Matrix-style the answers and clues to every single crossword ever — and I should be at the top with five-time reigning ACPT champ Dan Feyer. Congrats, Dan! Of course, the best part of the ACPT is just hanging out and chatting with friends who are just as into this whole puzzle business as I am. There are too many to name here, so I’ll just say good show, everyone! Let’s do it again sometime.

Oh, and here’s some other exciting news which I carelessly forgot to mention two weeks ago: Devil Cross puzzles are now available for download on the Android app Words With Crosses! Thanks a bunch to Adam Rosenfield for making that possible.

Enjoy today’s puzzle. There will be a new one on March 29.

       


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.