SUNDAY PUZZLE — I don’t give out awards for puzzles, because I think that if they’ve made it into The New York Times, they already have something special going for them. If I did, however, I would give Tom McCoy’s puzzle a gold star, just for all of the thematic theatrics that he has piled into today’s grid. It took me a while to fully appreciate the depth of the theme, but when I got it, as Will Shortz says below, it was definitely a wow.
We have seen themes where the set has a missing word in common, and we have seen themes where the theme entries form pictures. We have seen themes where constructors make nifty use of the black squares as part of the theme. And we have seen ELEVENTY million themes where the theme revealer was stashed elsewhere in the grid.
But have we seen a puzzle that has all of these in a single grid, that is also in Technicolor? I’m not sure we have.
Tom McCoy offers us a very colorful grid, particularly if you’re solving in crayon. You might want to try that today, because it really highlights his theme. In the corners of our puzzle are entries that FORM LETTERS (also a great play on words that is the ultimate revealer at 102 Across) if you can find the entries that are missing the appropriate colors.
Is that as clear as mud? Let’s look at the upper-left-hand corner, starting with 1 Across. The clue “Extremely attractive bodies” could have a few different answers (I’m watching you guys in the comments. Keep it clean!), but in this case what fits is the entry HOLES. Hmm. There’s a black square directly to the left of it; could the answer be BLACK HOLES?
Yes, but that’s not the reason. It turns out that that was a mean trick by Mr. McCoy to throw you off. Look again. “Banning from future work” at 3 Down is LISTING in the grid. There’s no black square there. Let’s keep going. At 40 Across, the answer to “That old’ stuff of song” is MAGIC. Shouldn’t that be BLACK MAGIC?
Indeed it should, and how did I know this, you ask? Look at the shape those three entries make. It’s the letter “I.” BLACK HOLES, BLACK LISTING and BLACK MAGIC. Would you believe me if I told you that the hint for figuring that out was already in the puzzle? Mosey on over to 85 Across: “Injury found in this grid’s upper-left corner.” That’s right: the injury is a BLACK EYE.
How cool is that?
Now go forth and find the other three LETTERS and their appropriate colors while we hear from Will Shortz and Mr. McCoy.
Will Shortz Notes:
Tom McCoy is a sophomore at Yale, co-captain of the Yale Road Running team and a 2013 United States Presidential Scholar. Two of his five previous puzzles in The Times have been named “Puzzle of the Week” on XwordInfo, and this one might make it three out of six. It’s definitely a wow.
Constructor Notes:
In his notes for a recent puzzle, Joel Fagliano mentioned how it is useful to tinker with a theme until you find the best presentation for it. This advice was extremely applicable to today’s puzzle, which began as three independent ideas that merged over about two years.
When a puzzle’s theme is not so straightforward, I like to delay the solver’s realization of the theme so that the epiphany happens gradually. So for this puzzle, I placed the black I one space from the edge so there would be a black square to the left of 1 Across (HOLES). Hopefully, when solvers realize that 1 Across should be BLACK HOLES, they will notice this (seemingly unnecessary) black square and initially conclude that the theme is a rebus where black squares stand for the word BLACK. I don’t know if this trick will work on many people, but I do like to delay the theme epiphany, and a trick or two can help to cause such a delay.
Thanks to Jeff Chen for advice on how to expand the selection of four- and five-letter words in my word lists. I fill by hand as much as possible, but a few of the wider open sections would have been messy without computer aid. Also, as always, thanks to Will Shortz for all the encouragement and for making the puzzle submission polished enough to be published.
I loved this puzzle, because it is unusual to see so many great ideas come together so elegantly. Congratulations, Mr. McCoy. You got a gold star out of me.
I’ll even forgive the weird spelling of KNINE (it’s actually K9), one of the cuter robots to come out of the BBC way of life, “Doctor Who.” Here he is, playing chess with the Doctor I grew up with, the amazing Tom Baker:
Your thoughts?