Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!

by Darby

• Play it ↗
• Difficulty: hard

A fun grid packed with wild fill. Aside from one problem corner the difficulty was just right. Overall a great, puzzling crossword.

The kind of circular grid shape that this puzzle employs works really well for midis. I like that the puzzle isn't easily divided into four corners, and ends up feeling quite a bit different from a full-sized crossword as a result. There's not really a right way to approach the solve. Every answer that you fill ends up contributing a lot of useful information to the rest of the grid, since the words overlap in lots of different places.

The star cross is smack-dab in the center with ABRACADABRA intersecting KANAKAMAOLI. If you had told me these two words were going to appear in today's puzzle I would've thought you were crazy. But it totally works! Even with nine A's to contend with the grid comes together nicely with lots of interesting words, like POLARIS and POWERMOVE, EVAPORATE and SEATBELTS. Good stuff.

I solved 95% of this puzzle in about ten minutes, with the remaining five spent puzzling over COATI on the left-hand side. At first I thought the reference to "band" was supposed to help me fill COATI, as if it were going to be something like PUNK or ROADIE or SINGER. Turns out "Raccoon relative that might form a band" is simply referring to the terminology for a group of COATIs. Cute, but unnecessarily misleading for a word I was never going to get anyway, especially when that word is crossing ONEK (meaning one kilometer, the arbitrarily-lengthened version of 1k).

But hey, COATI is just one small blemish on an otherwise great puzzle. The first ten minutes were perfect difficulty-wise for a grid of this size, with many tip-of-my-tongue definitions that I could go back and fill after I worked through some of the easier stuff.

As far as the clues go, I especially enjoyed "Adventurer, or where they might sleep" (CAMPER). I felt mighty clever working that one through. "Classic magic word that inspired the names of two Pokemon" (ABRACADABRA) isn't hard to figure out but boy is it satisfying to plonk. I do want to point out that "Swifties or the BeyHive, for example" (FANBASE) perfectly exemplifies Puzzmo's musical interests.

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