I finished in 42nd place, but with a mistake. In fact, it’s exactly the same mistake that hit me last year: I left an empty square by accident in puzzle 6. I think what happened now two years in a row, it I’m so excited to have successfully completed the difficult 5 puzzle that I let my guard down for the next puzzle, which is still much easier. Without the white square, I would have finished 24th, which still wasn’t enough to advance to the Division B final (this year, I would have had to finish 15th or higher to get there). Then again, I was literally using the best excuse in the world for why I wouldn’t do the right thing at all: being a new father! Elliot came with us to the Stamford Marriott, and the sleep I got Friday night was… not good, to say the least. Even with this added difficulty, I only made one mistake during the entire tournament, so I should probably consider myself lucky that I didn’t make several more. The tournament was still great and, of course, my son was the real star of the weekend. We brought Elliot into the lobby Saturday night, and almost everyone within 10 feet of his orbit came up to say hello and show him their best smiles. A few friends suggested that I should have entered the Pairs division with Elliot and then used him to distract everyone. I think this strategy would have worked wonderfully and no one would have been upset. He’s so adorable.
So let’s do the ACPT again next year, okay? In the meantime, you can order the ACPT puzzle set to solve at home and start planning for more crossword tournaments on the horizon. There’s Westwords in Berkeley, California on June 23, Lollapuzzoola in New York on August 24, and the Midwest Crossword Tournament in Chicago on October 5.
Today’s puzzle will seem unusual as soon as you see the grid. There are five sets of black squares that create closed boxes in 3×3 sections, with a single white square in the middle of each box. Also, if you solved the puzzle on paper, you will notice that the grid had gray squares rather than black squares, although they were normal black squares in the online version. Another strange feature is that several puzzle answers don’t seem to match the clues. 38A: [Gives up] is that… PAC? 17D: [One predicting disaster] is that… DOO? These don’t seem correct, but note that both answers are perpendicular to the attached box in the upper left corner.
You will get your first clue on the theme at 23A: [Confined, like five letters in this puzzle that spell an apt word] Which one is TRAP. So, these five isolated white squares contain letters, but the most important clue is at the bottom of the grid, with a particularly long clue at 122A: [Portal represented 20 times in this puzzle that lets you in and out of a confined space (Note: These special letters, reading left to right, row by row, will produce an apt four-word phrase)]. This answer is DOOR. The idea is that you have to create passages in and out of closed boxes to make sense of the ten clues in this puzzle. How are you doing that? By finding the correct letters hidden inside 20 black squares (or gray squares, for print solvers) and in the five isolated white squares.
- 38A: [Gives up] East PACKS IN. This starts with PAC at 38 A, continues into the box supplied with KSI and ends with TIN at 39A, which has its own normal index ([Shortest element]). The last three or four letters of these topic answers are all normal words with standard clues, so you’ll need to spot how the word coming out of the box is connected to the word entering it on the opposite side.
- PACKS IT IN crossing at 17 days: [One predicting disaster] East LOSSSAYER. It starts with DOO at 17D, continues to the box with MSA and ends with YES at 50D. The intersection of these two thematic responses—the isolated square in the middle of the box—is a S.
- 40A: [Units of exposure to X-rays] East ROENTPEOPLE. A potentially difficult word if you don’t know it – it’s named after the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen – but there’s a way to understand it more easily without needing to look it up. We will come back to this.
- Crossing ROENTGENS at 13 days: [Weapons and equipment in the “Medal of Honor” video game franchise, say] East COMBAT GEAR. The isolated place here is a T.
- 72A: [Not intimidated] East UNDAuNTED.
- Crossing INDAUNTED at 45D: [Looked upon with resentment] East BEGRuDGED. The isolated place here is a u.
- 102A: [Parsnips, turnips, etc.] East ROOT VSROPS.
- Crossing ROOT CULTURES at 76D: [Perfect, just perfect] East IMPEVSCABLE. The isolated place here is a VS.
- 104A: [Second leg of the Triple Crown] East PREAKNESS.
- Crossing PREAKNESS at 80 days: [Loser to Barack Obama in a 2004 Senate race] East ALAIN KEYES. The isolated place here is a K.
The isolated squares inside the boxes spell BLOCKED. This is the appropriate five-letter word referenced in the clue for TRAPPED 23A.
Now return to the DOOR clue at 122A. It said: “These special letters, read from left to right, line by line, will produce a suitable four-word sentence. » The more themed answers you discover, the more door letters you will reveal. When you have enough, you may be able to start predicting what the final four-word sentence will be and then fill in the gaps with more difficult answers like ROENTGENS.
The secret letters of the door, when you read them line by line in the puzzle, spell MAKE A GRAND ENTRANCE.
Even though the grid has letters hidden by darker squares, this crossword was not inspired by the total solar eclipse the previous week. I don’t think it had any direct inspiration other than a simple desire to break a typical crossword convention and see what I could do with enclosed spaces. What I found particularly difficult was finding a set of answers that could accommodate both the meta answers and the actual words outside of the boxes. The -NTG- string crossing the -ATG- string in the upper right box gave me a lot of trouble until I found COMB.To GEAR with its useful words COMB and EAR on the outside.
The final four-word meta-answer MAKE A BIG ENTRANCE is also why this puzzle was printed in gray squares rather than black squares. 20 secret letters is a lot to write in black squares, and the boxes are quite far apart, making the final answer sufficiently difficult to read. I thought making the squares lighter would help you see the hidden letters more easily. However, don’t expect to see gray squares again soon; I wouldn’t want to inform you all the time about the hidden letters.
