CROSSWORD #264

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 6x6 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 6x6 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 6x6 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 6x6 block? Surely, 7x7, 8x8 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 11x11 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.