Shortz’s own words, accompanied by a smiley face: “I think you’ll be a much less unpopular A.C.P.T.Please log in to bookmark this story. In fact, my clues as a whole were dialed down in difficulty. They were added following feedback from Mr. And the clue for FOOLS RUSH IN reads: “Start of an adage that hints at the answers to the 10 starred clues.” In my original version of Puzzle 5, there were no asterisks. You may have noticed that each of the theme clues in the final puzzle begins with an asterisk. I stood there awestruck for the entire 30 minutes. Shortz announced “One minute remaining,” the nearly full ballroom responded with nervous laughter. After 20 minutes, a trickle of solvers were leaving the room, at a glacial pace. Ten minutes passed, and only a minuscule number had completed the puzzle. Saturday, April Fools' Day 2023, I watched a large ballroom full of hundreds of eager solvers tackle my puzzle with intensity. For all the various ways to clue ISH, at 19-Down, I went with “language suffix,” which normally goes with the answer ESE, just to trip solvers up. For instance, “B₃, C₃, N₁, etc.” at 41-Down refers to Scrabble TILES, rather than chemical compounds. Meanwhile, I devoted plenty of time to the cluing in order to misdirect solvers in as many ways as I could think of. I was particularly partial to the linguistic term EGGCORN and the video game F-ZERO, which added some nice difficulty. Later came the phrase MET WITH, which really was the word MEH containing a TWIT.Īnd I may or may not have imagined a mad scientist-level laugh when I discovered CHASSIS (CHIS containing ASS), which could simply be clued “XXX,” or multiple of the Greek letter chi.īecause this grid has so much theme material, there were only limited opportunities to introduce lively fill into the puzzle. Five shorter answers in the grid also underwent the same fools-y wordplay, and the synonyms themselves were far more masked. So for the expert solvers in the room that understood the concept quickly enough, I added an extra layer. This needed to be harder than five answers sharing a goofy twist. Have-fun-but-also-have-a-hard-time Puzzle 5. As enjoyable as the finds struck me, though, I remembered that this was Puzzle 5. I was able to come up with five longish theme answers, plus the FOOLS RUSH IN revealer. Clue CRASH as the film (now “Best Picture winner of 2005”), and the solver adds a DUMMY. I could clue CHICKEN in a surprisingly different way (“Cowardly”), but the solver would need to append a loose synonym for “fool” (here, JERK) to form the full answer that appears in the grid.Īnother example: CRASH DUMMY. It seemed so ripe for a wordplay twist, with “fools” somehow “rushing in” to the grid.Ĭredit goes to Joel Fagliano, senior puzzle editor at The Times, who volunteered as a sounding board, and, upon liking the concept in principle, led me to JERK CHICKEN. After what must have been hours of brainstorming, over days, I thought of the proverbial phrase FOOLS RUSH IN. A “fool”-adjacent theme seemed well-timed, and could also serve as a sly wink to my favorite holiday in the Crossworld. I’ll never truly know, since my own Puzzle 5 theme had a convenient jumping-off point for inspiration: The Saturday of the tournament was April Fools' Day. With a blank “Puzzle 5” file on my computer, I found myself asking the same question I had exactly 10 years ago at my first tournament: “How did they think of it?” Or using “DNA” rebuses, but the long theme answers would hit one “DNA” rebus and continue later from another matching rebus, because the title riffed off the phrase “gene splicing.” … have I lost you yet?Įach idea was brain-breaking, to say the least. Answers that had to be written in the grid with all five vowels removed (Hello, actress JL RBRTS!). I still remember marveling at those wild, daunting Puzzle 5 challenges I solved - to varying degrees - in my A.C.P.T. Happy solving! It’s not for the faint of heart. It was my pleasure and genuine honor to construct Puzzle 5 for this year’s A.C.P.T. The vast majority of solvers come nowhere close. Oh, and you have only 30 minutes to finish the whole thing. Think a Thursday-plus-plus theme gimmick combined with Saturday-plus-plus cluing. It’s designed to be truly impenetrable on purpose, to separate the elite solvers from the rest of the pack. The impasse to any and all positive solving momentum up to that point.
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