“I’m not a fan of Thursdays.
What I didn’t know, because while I have pants, they’re not fancy, Thursdays are “tricksy” puzzles oftentimes.
So you have a clue like, “Writer Italo,” and you know it’s “Calvino,” but, what’s this, only 6 spaces?
Oh, that’s because two letters go in the same space.
There’s no rhyme or reason to the two letters going in the same space other than those two letters ALSO go with whatever crosses. So any of 6 boxes could contain two letters. There’s no pattern or reason to it, it’s not like it’s always the first two or the last two. It’s just wherever.
It’s ALSO not like you know which clues are going to double-up and which are standard, how many words have doubles, that it’s always across and never down. It’s just…whatever.
Then there are some where the answers are backwards, or are anagrams. Or will bend around a corner, starting across, then, at the end, going down.
All of this would be fine IF there was an indication, somewhere in the puzzle, that this was going on.
I think a really good crossword puzzle, when it does something funky, gives you a clue. Like a, “XYZ, but also a clue to 17 down, 14 across…”
It doesn’t have to be 100% laying it out, it should just indicate to you that SOMETHING is going on here. But to just not say anything about it anywhere feels like an artificial increase in difficulty.
What makes games fun is the way that the gamemaker works within those rules to do something new and clever, but in a way that a player has a decent shot at getting it.
If you change the rules with no indication…
As an example, if you signed up to play in a rec baseball league, and you step up to the plate, get a hit, and then, after running the bases, you’re told, “Sorry, there’s actually a hidden additional base in the park, and you missed it,” you’d feel cheated. Because, had you known this version of baseball was a very different version, even if you didn’t know exactly what was different, you would’ve had a fighting chance. You would’ve been on the lookout for something unusual, or if something felt just a little off, you’d be like, “Okay, I’m expecting something to be off, maybe this is it…”
Without knowing there was anything unusual, it just didn’t make sense.
Another example?
You’re playing Monopoly. An electronic version. You’ve got all 3 properties for a color, but for some
reason, it doesn’t register as a monopoly. And then, you roll a 5 for the fifth time, and it unlocks a 5th side of the board, revealing another property you’d need to get that monopoly.
There was really no way of knowing that you needed to roll a specific number a specific number of times to make this happen, it’s just sort of a thing built into the game by one maniac who decided that’s how it should be.
And that’s the OTHER thing: It’s not like ALL of these are tricksy. Just some. So you can’t be sure.
I’m not a rule-oriented guy for the most part, and I really appreciate a clever thing happening in a crossword, a rhyme scheme that makes it a challenge, a set of clues that go together and fool with the rules in a consistent way. But this bullshit, no thank you. “