Crosswords

Puzzle 785: Freestyle 718. Are you picking up what I’m putting down?

1 Comment

Last Tuesday’s freestyle solution

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Word count: 72 (17×13)
Mean word length: 5.14

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I thought up a nice entry that I really wanted to put into a grid. It happened to be 17 letters long. Problem? What problem? I can do what I want! (read in Eric Cartman voice) So I just squeezed the grid a bit. Let me tell you, though, that entry was a son of a gun to write a clue for without violating the standard rules.

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Crosswords

Puzzle 782: Freestyle 715. Time to start the show.

6 Comments

Last Friday’s freestyle solution

Get the PDF here!

Get the PUZ here!

Word count: 64 (yikes!)
Mean word length: 5.72

Have something you wanna say? Got a question? Wanna do a guest freestyle? Wanna just say hello? Hit me up by email!

Yup, so I feel like you deserve an explanation as to how the hell this thing got down to 64! This is only the second 64-entry grid that I’ve posted out of 715. (The other one is here.) It came purely by accident. I was definitely trying for a goofy-looking triple-stack grid. Then… (spoiler to follow, highlight the space to read it after you solve…) you might notice that the first seven letters of 8-Down and the last seven letters of 20-Down are words by themselves. That’s because I had originally had a block splitting those entries (at the end of what’s now 32-Across and the start of what’s now 34-Across); the stacks were originally 14-13-12 with a seven-letter word next to them. But… I noticed that I could extend each seven-letter word to make a (4,7)/ (7,4) phrase and still make the stack work! So I moved some blocks around and added some to make the grid work. This 11-12-13-14 is the closest you’ll ever see me get to a full-on quad-stack, folks!

Thanks so much to all who’ve left a tip! It’s much appreciated, believe me.

As always, share this link! Pass it around! New puzzle on Tuesday!