Just Wing It!
by Alex Eaton-Salners
- Play it ↗
- Difficulty: easy-medium
I'll stand by the TXW rules of crosswords today and maintain that grids shaped like a thing make for bad puzzles. On one hand, opening the puzzle prompts an "oh, how pretty" that lasts a few seconds. On the other, actually solving the thing is an exercise in overcoming mundane fill. It's just hard for a constructor to make an interesting puzzle in the constraints of a shapely grid.
Unchecked squares[1] are controversial but at least 11D and 21D have a combined
clue: "or, with 21-Down, dwindle" (RUN LOW). It's a cute way to call
attention to the head and butt (?) of the butterfly shape.
An absolutely devilish upper-right corner tanked my time until I relented and
used a hint. FCC crossed with CARPS is brutal. Were I missing either the
leading F or ending C of FCC, it'd be an obvious fill. But the middle? I don't
know, my list of federal buildings begins and ends at FTC. Everything else is
in competition for being the most esoteric. And don't get me started on the clue
for CARPS.
If CARPS was unpleasant, LYRA clued as "actor who played young Princess Leia
on 'Obi-Wan Kenobi'" is downright upsetting. Not because it was hard to fill or
due to any particular disdain for the actress, but because it made me remember
that chase scene in the show where Leia spends thirty minutes running around in
circles as incompetent space-bandits fail to capture her. Why did this puzzle
have to remind me of the existence of that show?
It's generally expected that squares are clued with both an across and a down. An unchecked square is a square that is clued by either an across or a down, but not both. ↩︎
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