It's Not Easy Being Green

 

Hello again! I'm in Siena, Italy this month, but fall semester starts soon, so these are my last few days of freedom. This is a fun little midi puzzle that I initially made as a 15x15, but I decided it would be better with grid art. Everything is better with grid art.

Before we get to today's puzzle, though, here are two mini grids created by solvers from last month's challenge!

Grid 17 by Charles Montpetit

Grid 19 by Jeff Corbin

Today's puzzle:

Repeating Tile Mini Grids

 

I've been wanting to experiment with the idea of tiles in crosswords since the einstein took the popular science world by storm a couple years ago. At first I tried to make a grid shaped like an einstein tile, but after hours of trying, the grid bore no resemblance to the shape.

I gave up on the shape itself and turned to creating tiles with a regular mini crossword grid. The einstein's uniqueness comes from its nonrepeating pattern, which I obviously couldn't replicate in crossword format, but I did manage to create a series of 5x5 mini grids which, when repeated infinitely like tiles, form a coherent grid. (The idea is that the letters repeat as well as the pattern of black squares.) I call them the Repeating Tile Mini Grids; if you can think of a catchier name, please tell me.

I wrote a script to generate all possible mini grids which are fillable and follow crossword rules when repeated infinitely, and dumped them all in an Excel spreadsheet. Each sheet shows a different grid repeated four times so you get an idea of the pattern. There are 4,831 grids, some of which are more visually interesting than others. And since I can't fill them all myself, I am sharing the spreadsheet with you all. Browse the patterns, pick a favourite grid or two, and fill it yourself! Be sure to let me know (via blog or email: fcorbin567 at gmail dot com) when you make one so I can solve it. You can also use them in your bathroom tiles, or perhaps the fabric for your newest piece of crossword-themed clothing.

grids.xlsx

This example is on sheet 78. I've called it "Checkmarks" because I think the pattern looks like checkmarks.

Sample puzzle (PDF + solution)

Here are some more of my favourites that I've found so far:

Interesting-looking stairs, #91

Waves, #117

This one is a little out there, but I think it looks like feet walking on a road. #211

Happy solving, and happy making!!

Big Telescope, Small Puzzle

 

Happy 25 puzzles!! (me from the future: I culled some of them on the new blog so this may not be the 25th puzzle here lol)

My very first puzzle on this blog (which I will NOT be carrying over to the Blogger, lmao) was a James Webb Space Telescope-inspired puzzle called Mirror Images. It was a huge undertaking that used hexagons instead of squares for the grid, and the fill was unsurprisingly terrible. I posted it anyway because I thought it was pretty cool that I got it to at least somewhat work. I decided recently that the idea would work better on a smaller scale, and I realized that the actual Webb mirror shape made a great mini crossword! So here is a tiny puzzle inspired by a huge telescope. Happy solving!

PDF / solution

I'm Doing It Again (and again and again) Baby!

I'm back from another long semester (and summer course) with another blog puzzle! Apparently since I last published on here, Wix has begun offering AI suggestions for posts. They're all stuff like "Tech: The Cruciverbological Angle." Apparently their AI doesn't know that I made that word up.

For non-CS people, this puzzle is about recursion (correctly working recursion, not whatever is happening in the image I found). Here is a good explanation.

One more thing: I have an outlet debut coming up on 6/19 that I'm excited about, so make sure to check DCL that day!!

You're Projecting

 

Happy first blog puzzle of 2024! I constructed it in one night while staying up to find out if my university TAs were going on strike or not. (They were not.) I've been wanting to make this puzzle for months, though, and I'm so happy I finally get to share it with you all!

Since my last blog puzzle, I've gotten to check two awesome things off my crossword bucket list: I was a constructor for the Boswords Winter Wondersolve, and I'm a contributor to These Puzzles Fund Abortion 4, which will be released soon! I had so much fun working on my puzzles for both of these things, and I'm so grateful to John and Rachel (and the rest of the TPFA team) for letting me work with them.

I'm working on getting in speed solving shape for my second ACPT! Unfortunately, I'll miss the last day (eclipse chasing) but will try to be so far ahead by Saturday that even Paolo Pasco can't catch up. (This is a joke. I came in 637th last time and my only goal is to do better than that.)

Anyway, happy solving!