CURRICULUM VITAE: Fresh Freestyle Crosswords

Fresh Freestyle Crosswords, my new book of themeless, or freestyle, crossword puzzles, is currently available for preorder and will officially drop on November 1!

Over the weekend I received a box with advanced copies of the book. It was like Christmas in October, which I guess is the way everybody experiences Christmas these days. The cover design is eye-catching, if a bit edgy for the author in question, and the inside layout is slick and attractive as is the case with all Puzzlewright titles.

The material from the book comes from the Autofill Project, which I started several years ago. The project was a label for my pastime of improving the wordlist database that I reference for crossword construction. Part of the project involved creating puzzles to test autofill quality, as well as highlight interesting database additions. I dubbed these puzzles “unthemelies” because they were themeless and a bit unseemly, at least at the onset, due to the rawness of the database. The project and the puzzles improved and I began offering the Unthemely crossword puzzles on my blogs for solver feedback. Peter Gordon at Puzzlewright Press offered to publish the collection when I had enough for a book and I agreed.

About two-thirds of the puzzles in the book appeared on one of my blogs at some point in the past. The rest are original puzzles or heavily revised versions of Unthemely puzzles. In one case, I kept an Unthemely diagram structure, deleted every entry except one (which was not the original seed entry) and refilled the grid. I submitted the puzzles to Peter in an order that is basically chronological and I believe an arc of fill improvement is noticeable as one works through the book.

I hope all you themeless crossword puzzle fans will enjoy the book. If you choose to manually type the title on your favorite online bookseller website rather than use the link at the top of this post, beware that “Fresh Freestyle” may lead you to a manual on swimming and triathlon exercises. On the other hand, if you are into honing the body as well as the find, put both books in your virtual shopping cart and reap the benefits!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Piece of Cake Crosswords/Son of the Crypt/DCPHR

Patrick Blindauer has launched a Kickstarter for a weekly series of easy crossword puzzles. Piece of Cake Crosswords will be delivered electronically and contain no obscure vocabulary, including crutch entries like APSE that make the cut in many early-week crosswords because of handy letter patterns. Subscription tiers include copies of Patrick’s Puzzlefest crossword suites and master classes with Patrick on crossword construction.

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Patrick Berry has released a sequel to his The Crypt cryptic crossword collection.  Son of the Crypt is a set of 13 never-before-published cryptic crosswords including five block-style diagrams and eight are variety cryptics. The collection is available exclusively on Patrick’s A-Frame Games website.

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Registration has already closed but I want to make a late announcement for the DC Puzzle Hunt Race, or DCPHR (pronounced “decipher”), being held on October 15 in the DC area. Todd Etter of The Famine Games fame organized the event and I expect that puzzle hunt will have some excellent production values.

 

CURRICULUM VITAE: Drawing Conclusions

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS
(Visual Trivia)

Teams of three begin the game separated. Each player is equipped with a writing utensil and a “drawing sheet”: a piece of vellum marked off into numbered squares. Players are independently shown collections of lines and shapes that they must re-create by drawing them in the squares on the drawing sheets. The team then reunites and stacks the drawing sheets on top of each other in various ways to create recognizable images when the individual drawings are combined. The team answers trivia questions that reference the combined drawings.

 

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I devised a cooperative drawing game called Drawing Conclusions for a birthday game party in 2007 and presented it again at a minicon in Los Angeles. In this version of the game, the artist produced a large based on verbal instructions from a series of “communicators” and then answered questions related to the completed picture. The game was intended as a variation on the classic picture memory quizzes in puzzle magazines. The game was not successful due to the difficulty of the drawing task and large amount of down time players endured when not participating in a drawing round. I brainstormed a bit more on the game mechanics and developed a new system in which combined drawing would be incorporated by see-through paper rather than verbal instructions. I also replaced the single large picture with a series of smaller images. I proposed this new version of Drawing Conclusions as a main program activity for the 2009 convention in Baltimore and was accepted.

While coming up with ideas for images, I quickly realized that dividing a whole into three parts was generally inefficient. A better approach was to pick a basic shape, e.g. a triangle, and finding two other shapes that the first could combine with to make two complete images, e.g. another triangle to make the star of David and a series of lines to make the light prism on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I also strove to find ways to use all possible pairings of three part images to create three wholes. The golf green/musical note/fried egg triad was the most successful of these attempts. The three drawing sheets, each marked off into twelve squares, produced images for 24 trivia questions. The game was well received at the Baltimore convention. Many recall that the game received a standing ovation for its instructions. The part of the instructions that received accolades was the revelation that the drawing sheets would be stacked in various combinations and not simply as in unified stack of three sheets. Lance Nathan also praised the game for the diversity of the subject matter, noting that every member of the team had an opportunity to have an aha moment in recognizing a combined image and tying it to the trivia question. I reran Drawing Conclusions once for a birthday game party and also provided moderator sets for others to run at game events.