Crosswords! Mostly themeless, no set schedule
Crosswords! Mostly themeless, no set schedule
Grid shape pretty well sums up the year I think. Sorry to all y'all PuzzleMe & PDF solvers - I can't get this to upload nicely into either a PDF converter nor PuzzleMe. If you can, let me know & I'll update with a new link.
PDF - thanks to @rowsdowers
Before we get to the puzzle, just a quick thanks, to you, for swinging by. I genuinely feel joy every 10ish days sending a puzzle out to the world for people to enjoy. This year has sucked, and the puzzle community has been a welcome respite from everything else. So thank you fellow constructors, streamers, solvers, and anyone else connected whatsoever to crosswords. Very delighted to be a tiny part of this wonderful community.
Looking ahead to next year - I have been branching out a bit. I have a little meta suite that's all gridded out & halfway clued - look for that in the next couple months. I've also been playing with Trail Mix varieties (inspired by Eric Berlin's fantastic Puzzlesnacks book) (buy local if you can, Bezos & the Waltons already have a sickeningly large amount of money). When I'm actually able to finish one of those grids, I'll drop that here too as a bonus. Don't worry though, the core of this site will stay the same for 2021 - at least three free puzzles a month, most of which will be themeless (I have quite the backlog of unclued grids to choose from).
Anyways, all I will say about this one is that I made my big run at cluing it on the night of Christmas Eve, after playing Santa's elf and wrapping up presents & stockings & whatnot. I had some help from my good friends at the Ardbeg distillery that night - learned why it took for-eeeeeever to drag my parents out of bed on Christmas morning.
I've been sitting on this one for a couple months, waiting to send it in to the NYT. But it never ends up happening, which means you get it now, for free!
Huh, that's strange. I had a puzzle all lined up and ready to go today, but it looks like it's been replaced with a Steve Mossberg one. Not quite sure how that happened. Oddly enough, we also happen to play each other in LearnedLeague today. His puzzle is quite delightful (unsurprisingly) so I'm more than happy to host it here. Happy solving, and I'd be sure to check out Square Pursuit when you're done!