Forum > General Discussion
19 black squares
Cleveland A. McElfresh:
Today's NYT's puzzle. By Joe Krozel. Is that some type of record?
sonofagun:
Nope. I believe it's Kevin Der. 16 blocks.
Cleveland A. McElfresh:
Crazy. It was a great puzzle too. nicely clued except for the esoteric stuff you have to put in to make everything fit...
DougP:
Yes, it was an excellent puzzle! Joe Krozel has done 3 puzzles with 19 black squares. And Kevin Der holds the record with an 18-block puzzle.
Check 'em all out here:
http://xwordinfo.com/Density.aspx
jorkel:
Thanks for enjoying the puzzle, folks.
There was a nice little Bonus interview on the "Wordplay" movie DVD with Manny Nosowsky and Joe DiPietro about constructing the first 19-block puzzle. I think Kevin Der said that was his inspiration for constructing his 18-block puzzle. There's a nice interview with Kevin on JimH's old blog: http://www.xwordblog.com/2008/08/kevin-g-der-the-new-champion.html
I talk a little about the construction of my first 19-block puzzle here:
http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/work/#more-1509
I'll just reemphasize a point I made in that interview that the key to achieving clean fill is to be diligent about reranking one's wordlist. In fact, even if you have a messy wordlist, you can still clean up the portion that's needed for any puzzle you are currently working on: If you're using Crossword Compiler in manual mode, word-selection menus will come up for each position in the grid: just right-click on any word in the menu, and a banner will come up which will let you change the rank. After you change a few word ranks in your menu, just click on the "Score" header and that menu will be resorted with the new ranks. (Alas, I stray, but hopefully it's a useful tip).
Regards,
Joe Krozel
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version