monorail's crosswords

Ups and Downs

Grid: 15x15

This was the first crossword I constructed! There was obvious room for improvement; there are a couple of unchecked squares that I accidentally introduced while adjusting the grid, for example. Rather than throw out more work than I was comfortable with, I just made a joke about it in one of the clues. I'm proud of it as a first effort.

This puzzle was, in a way, a collaboration with my friend Amy (it's complicated, don't worry about it). The theme clues refer to the two of us by name, and they're pretty unfair if you don't know us personally. For a hint at the theme to get you started without knowing both of us, hover over the following text block:

My fursona is 80 feet tall. Amy's not a furry, but her online persona is just a touch over 4 inches tall. Our extreme sizes are the joke in the theme clues.

I like the theme, though it has a pretty specific target audience (a couple other clues in the grid are nods to people or jokes from my corner of the fediverse, though they have less of an impact on the solve than the theme does), and it came together well.

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Two or More

Grid: 15x15

My second crossword, and my second collaboration with Amy (again, in a way). If you know, you know. If you don't: After solving the puzzle, you'll know!

I'm really proud of the theme here, I think the way it manifests is funny and it's all tied to something close to my heart. It's not perfect, though. If you aren't already familiar with the core concept that the theme is built around, you'll have to get it from crosses, because working backwards from the other theme words is pretty unlikely. A number of solvers have also told me that it wasn't until near the end or even after the end of the solve that they worked out how the highlighted answers actually tied into the theme.

If you did the puzzle and still need help getting it, here's how the theme works: Each of the highlighted answers is the first half of a common "___ system" phrase, made plural. So "buddy system" becomes BUDDIES, for example. Is it too cute for its own good? Who knows!

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Grid: 10x10

This was the first puzzle I created entirely on my own. I came up with the theme and then struggled hard to fit it into an actual grid. I wanted to try constructing something a bit smaller, since my first two had been 15x15 puzzles, which is "standard" for newspapers but can be a lot for new solvers just checking out what their friends made.

What I discovered is that laying out a smaller grid is really, really tough. Many times I'd lay out my theme words in a way that made sense, only to discover that the desicion I made had incredibly wide-reaching consequnces for what the grid could look like. I'd find myself in a situation where I had to either include a lot of nearly grid-spanning words, which is very very difficult to do, or be forced into having unchecked squares or words shorter than three letters. Eventually, I found a way to have my four theme words in the two center rows and two center columns of the grid, which I was very proud of, and constructing around that got me this layout. I didn't notice until after the fill that more than 70% of the words were exactly three letters long. Whoops!

If you don't understand the title to this puzzle, you may find yourself struggling with it. Heads up :P

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Is there a Mr. Direction?

Grid: 6x15

This one was an experiment with an oddly-shaped grid. As you can see, the preview has made this page layout a little bit funky, and I'm not enough of a web designer to care enough to fix it at the moment :3

Most crossword puzzles I've seen have been squares, but that's purely convention, and recently I've seen a lot of puzzles constructed in funnier shapes so I wanted to give it a shot. Being much, much narrower than normal let me fit in the theme words that I wanted without having to fill out a whole standard grid. It did come with restrictions, though. To keep the layout interesting I allowed myself two 2-letter words, which are discouraged by many crossword style guides, but without them I could never have two acrosses on the same line. There are also some answers that I think are pretty clearly concessions I had to make; I think you'll probably be able to feel me going "whatever, fine, I just need something to make this grid work" when you fill in a couple of them.

This theme is targeted at people who are familiar with crosswords, though I won't say much more. It's not necessary for the solve, but a brand new solver may not understand why certain words are highlighted.

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B is for Boo-boo

Grid: 9x9

This one I made because, honestly, I was really bored. If you're curious why I was so bored, you'll have to solve the puzzle, because the answer is there! :3

I was worried about this one because it came together suspiciously quickly. Usually there's some amount of struggle to getting a grid I'm happy with. Multiple revisions, having to throw out things I'm proud of because they lead to dead ends, that kind of thing. And as I work on getting everything together, I find myself improving the puzzle. None of that happened for this one! It just kind of all worked, and I was afraid that the lack of iteration would mean it wasn't as good of a puzzle as it could have been. But, this puzzle received praise from people I respect and was featured on the front page of Crosshare! So, what do I know, I suppose.

One thing to note is that this is the first puzzle I made since seeing some advice from experienced constructors about filling in clues in a random order. The intention is to avoid any kind of trend born of fatigue from showing up in just the late downs. I tried that for this puzzle and I was happy with the results, so I'll probably continue doing it going forward.

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monorail cryptic 1

Grid: 8x5

What do you know, a cryptic!

Cryptic crosswords are really interesting to me, and only recently have I started to be introduced to some that I feel like are accessible to me. That experience lead to this, an attempt at making one of our own. It's simple and super small, with only 7 clues and answers, but we enjoyed putting it together.

I owe my thanks to riotblob for playtesting this one before I published it and offering a lot of advice, especially when it comes to cryptic correctness. Much of their advice improved the puzzle, and some of it I chose not to follow, so if there's anything you dislike it's definitely my own fault!

This is also, just by happenstance, our first themeless puzzle. Getting a cryptic to come together at all, even at this tiny size, was enough of a challenge already! :3

I don't usually come back to edit the author's notes, but: Now that a few more people have solved this, I think I should mention that this is absolutely our first cryptic, and it's definitely flawed. I made some easy changes where I could to fix some correctness issues, but not all of them are easily fixable. Little tense and verb plurality isuses that I don't know that I can fix without destroying the surface.

It's also worth noting that I like to approach puzzle construction in a kind of fast-and-loose way; I want to write clues that make sense to me and I'm willing to bend and stretch rules for the sake of a clue I like more. My understanding is that this is roughly the distinction between US- and UK-style cryptics, with UK cryptics following more rigid rules and US ones going a little bit more by vibes (Editing again to say that this is not as cut and dry as I thought it was at the time!). This is the first puzzle I had playtested before publishing it, but riotblob primarily solves UK-style cryptics so I did keep the fact that they're used to stricter cluing rules than I wanted to use in mind when I considered their feedback. I'll only know for sure if I went too far in that direction with experience.

I'm absolutely still proud of the puzzle, I just think you deserve this warning! :P

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Down by the Bay

Grid: 9x9

Yeah, I don't know. Sorry.

This one goes out to Dob and Momes from Crossweird, a crossword stream I've been watching for the past few months. Something they've been doing recently is solving hard puzzles with the help of chat, after using this tool to remove all the across clues, leaving them with only downs... and then using it again to replace about a third of the words with "turtle". So I got the idea in my head of constructing a puzzle where the word turtle really does appear in each down clue at least once. I think it's a fun idea because most people do the acrosses first, so hiding a gimmick in the downs feels like a punchline.

Yes, obviously, I would have LOVED to call this puzzle "Turtles All the Way Down". God, what a good title. I'm actually a little angry with myself that I'm not using it. Unfortunately, it makes the joke a little obvious. I don't want to mention turtles in the title directly because I'm afraid of the jig being up when you read your first down clue. By only alluding to turtles (I checked, you can find them at the bay) I hope it'll take at least two :3

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Despite Everything

Grid: 11x11

Excluding the cryptic, this is my first themeless puzzle. I hadn't made one in a while and had the itch, so I popped open my spreadsheet of "Words and clues I'd like to put into a puzzle" and constructed a grid around one of them.

Previously I had a paragraph here that kind of couched expectations because there were parts of the puzzle I wasn't sure about, but it read more self-depricating than I intended and since then people have told me that they liked solving it. So never mind! Enjoy the puzzle it's sick as hell 😎