by Ross Trudeau
[.puz][PDF][Solution] Difficulty: 4/5
n.b. Today’s puzzle is 21×21, so the clues may appear above/below the puzzle, rather than alongside it. If you’ve got a printer, I also think this one’s going to play better on paper.
This week is the 3-year anniversary of making Rossword Puzzles a weekly feature. At the time, I had a handful of grids that I didn’t think were right for print, and decided to start a little run of blog puzzles following closely on one another’s heels. It was just coincidence that statewide lockdown orders would begin a couple of weeks later, at which point I decided sharing a free weekly puzzle could be my small personal contribution to the collective national sanity.
To current events: the Boswords Spring Themeless League kicks off tomorrow night. Registration is still open. Meanwhile, ACPT is still a month away (though I gather that the group rate block has sold out).
Many thanks to Ben, Brian, and Kaye of kaybartplays for test solving this week. Thoughts and spoilers for “Common Ground” below.
I know, I know, I know. I already acknowledged a few weeks ago that my quantum puzzle kick was approaching, shall we say, quantumania. In truth, I did think the last few so-called Schrödinger grids were enough to get it out of my system. But “Common Ground” was ambitious and fun enough to draw me back in, and a quantum puzzle of this scope does feel like something of a pièce de résistance.
This grid took longer to create than any other crossword I’ve made to date. The challenge with this kind of puzzle is that any individual valid quantum answer is going to be more or less immutable in its length, and each intersecting answer will be similarly hard-and-fast in its content and length. (In other words, you’re building the grid and the theme material simultaneously.) The implication here is that the symmetrical portion of the grid is going to be totally rigid, and extremely inhospitable to supporting *its own* quantum material.
Also worth noting that the original revealer (and indeed, the inspiration for the whole puzzle) was TWO-STATE / SOLUTION. About as apt as revealers come. I even built a whole separate middle of the grid (see below) that supported it. Ultimately, however, it felt just a skosh tasteless to use such a fraught concept as fodder for cutesy-wutesy word play. After all, the “two-state solution” is almost universally reviled among the various stakeholders, and considered anathema by many. I’d be curious to hear what you all think: would TWO-STATE SOLUTION as a revealer rub you the wrong way? Leave a comment below.
In any case, I hope you’ve enjoyed Rosswords Quantumania, such as it has been. Happy solving, friends.
-Ross
