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THURSDAY PUZZLES |
Conquer the NYT Crosswords (12) |
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Thursday is called "Gimmick Day" by some New York Times crossword ficionados, because this is the day many of the trickiest, twistiest puzzles are published. Plenty of Thursday puzzles have conventional themes with clues of medium difficulty, but when an innovative creation pops up, it's most often on a Thursday (or in the larger Sunday puzzle).
One popular gimmick is the rebus puzzle, in which the solver must enter multiple letters in a single square, draw little pictures, or write a numeral or symbol in each rebus square. For example, a Sunday crossword in 1993 included rebus squares that were to be filled with colors (or the color names): a [GREEN] square was the intersection between AL [GREEN] and [GREEN] BEANS. A 2005 Thursday puzzle included the abbreviations for the days of the week as rebuses: MON, TUE, WED, etc. Another Thursday crossword published in 2001 used the @ symbol to replace the letter pair AT throughout the grid.
Many rebus puzzles dispense with the requirement for symmetrical placement of theme entries (it is often too difficult to construct a rebus puzzle with strict thematic symmetry). Asymmetry makes it that much harder to guess which entries contain a rebus square.
How will you know if a crossword contains rebus action? If some answers seem obvious but won't fit into their allotted spaces, you may be solving a rebus puzzle. Rebuses pose an extra challenge on several levels. First, you have to recognize that a set of rebus squares is in play. When you've figured out the first rebus square, you often don't know if the other rebus squares will contain the same letters/symbol (as with the @ puzzle) or a related rebus (e.g., [TIC], [TAC] and [TOE] squares, the numerals from 1 to 9, etc). When you know an entry will contain a rebus square because it's too long, it's not always obvious where the rebus falls within that entry. And you won't know where each rebus square is lurking in the puzzle.
Other Thursday gimmicks involve filling in entries backwards or upwards, which means the theme entries look nonsensical when viewed in the standard direction. Crazy letter sequences might usually mean the solver has a crossing entry wrong, but—especially if it's a Thursday puzzle—a gimmick could also be present.
Some gimmicks involve a great amount of work on the part of the constructor or editor, but yield a crossword that isn't obviously gimmicky at first glance. Several constructors have made crosswords in which the fill and clues alike exclude, say, any use of the letter S. A few puzzles have used only a single vowel in the fill.
Another gimmick is the puzzle within a puzzle. Perhaps there's a connect-the-dots puzzle within the crossword—a giant letter A made by joining all the letter As in the grid, say, or a giant O comprising all the letter Os.
A gimmicky Sunday crossword honoring Al Hirschfeld (the cartoonist who hid the name NINA in each of his drawings) included a word-search aspect—NINA could be found 16 times in the grid, traveling in any direction. Similarly, theme entries can be unrelated except that a set of related words are embedded within them.
The clues are sometimes where a gimmick is centered: a list of clues in alphabetical order, say, or clues that all start with the same letter. Writing clues under such restraints takes a tremendous amount of skill on the part of the constructor and editor. When executed well with clues that sound natural, even an observant solver might not pick up on the feat.
If you've just started trying to tackle the Thursday crossword, remember that the clues are markedly tougher than those in a Monday or Tuesday puzzle, and always be prepared for surprising twists, clever flouting of the standard conventions and rebuses.