Water Fight!

by Eric Mao

• Play it ↗
• Difficulty: medium-hard

Similar to yesterday, today's grid is an asymmetrical arrangement that has a Mondrain-esque feel to it. There's something inherently pleasing about a grid that's just a few connected blocks of rectangles. These two crosswords have been a nice break from the usual symmetrical fare (particularly when one of those puzzles was in the shape of a butterfly).

This time the asymmetrical grid is accompanied by a very creative theme. The themer clues are sets of coordinates from the game BATTLESHIP ("Hits: [A11, B11, C11, D11]"), each answer taking the form of a ship type from the game. I didn't grok the theme until I had filled BATTLESHIP, where I remembered back to my childhood that different lengths of coordinates in the grid corresponded to different kinds of ships.

Unfortunately, neither my childhood nor adulthood remembered CARRIER was a kind of ship and the bottom-left corner became a real problem for me. The down fill in that section is particularly awful, full of strange trivia and stranger combinations of letters (IRR, BAI, RAITA, UNSER). Without knowing the ship (which I almost assumed was just CRUISER again, since it began with a "C" and ended with an "ER") I had to use a hint.

I surprised myself by plonking "Most widely-spoken artificial language", ESPERANTO. I had learned about this language while reading a book on constructed languages (conlangs for short) by David J. Peterson, the guy behind Dothraki. ESPERANTO is an interesting study because it's designed to be a universal second language, one that's easy to learn for global communication. Outside of ESPERANTO, there's a whole subculture of people who build these sorts of languages for fun.

Overall, this theme rules. It does kind of hijack the usual crossword-solving experience, since the themer clues are replaced with game notation. But as a whole it's just a great idea.

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