Diagramless crossword woes: Help!

Cafe Society
1

Every week I do the Sunday New York Times crossword. When finished (or, sometimes, as finished as I’m gonna get), I move on to the secondary puzzle on the page. Usually it’s an acrostic, which is less fun for me but still worth a gander.

And then … sometimes … I find the dreaded diagramless crossword. Blech. I never even tried one, since they just seemed impossible. How could anyone possibly figure out where the words start and which squares should be left blank? Are there some hidden tricks for figuring these things out?

Well, long story short, I was bored at my doctor’s office earlier this week and had my copy of the NY Times magazine from Sunday, September 12. I hunkered down and gave the diagramless a try. Four days later, I cracked the sucker at last! Yay! Dunno if I’ll ever be able to repeat the accomplishment, but I’m still embarrassingly proud of myself.

Except that I still don’t understand one of the answers. I know I have it solved correctly, because all the other words that use the letters are right. But neither the clue nor the answer even make any sense to me. So can anyone help me out here?

The clue is: “Like a line, in short.” Four letters.

The answer is:

“Oned” – WTF? I’ve never even heard of this word. Is this some kind of arcane past tense verb? Is it an acronym? The “in short” indicates an abbreviation, but I don’t know what it could be short for. On. Ed.? Ontario Education? UGH! Maybe I’ve just been staring at it too long – watch, the explanation is gonna be something so obvious that I’ll totally kick myself for not getting it, LOL. Help me!

Anyway, I’m still happy to have figured out my first diagramless. With this first victory under my belt, I shall have a whole new vista of puzzles is conquer! Look upon me, O Will Shortz and those of your ilk, and despair!

(Guess I shouldn’t get too cocky; eventually I’ll run up against my nemesis, the evil Cryptic Crossword. Those suckers are totally antithetical to the way I think.)

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One dimensional. With “d” standing “in short” for dimensional.

And good job, BTW!

3

I really enjoy diagramless crosswords - there is the added element of figuring out the layout by using a little bit of logic and guesswork.

I’m sure there are some detailed tips on the web, but here are some of the important elements:

  • understand that x-words can’t “orphan” a letter - it must be part of two clues. Another way of saying this is that there cannot be a one-letter entry, and neither can there be a two-letter entry.

  • learn the 3 types of symmetry for the layout: 1) Mirror inverted. 2) Mirror. 3) Full. The first is standard, and can be seen for most x-words; the right side of the puzzle is a mirror reflection of the left and flipped over. The second is left/right mirror running down the puzzle, and the third is the same except the bottom is symmetrical with the top as well; i.e. each quadrant is the same (but mirrored).

  • layouts are square with an odd number of letters, e.g. 17x17, or 21x21. The centre square is key to the symmetry. Once you get to the centre square, the symmetry will determine the bottom part of the layout (unless it is type 2). At this point you are doing a regular puzzle.

  • (except for type 2) the number of across clues will show you how the middle row runs: let’s say there are 34 across clues (an even number)… the 9’th row in a 17x17 has to be something like:


.xxxx.......xxxx.

or


xxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxx

if there are 34 across clues (an odd number)… the 9’th row has to be something like:


.xxx..xxxxx..xxx.

or


xxxxx..xxx..xxxxx

The tough part is getting started. There will be several unconnected “regions” at the top. You may get well into the puzzle before these regions connect. Advanced diagramless puzzle designers go to great lengths to make this difficult.

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whoops, that should be “35” clues for the second set of examples…

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So how does one work on such a puzzle? Until one figures out the pattern, one can’t just start wily-nilly putting words in the grid, because one doesn’t where they’ll be relative to each other. Does one just resort to a whole lot of scratch paper and a Scrabble board? Or just erase an awful lot? It seems to me that there’s a limit to how much erasing newsprint can sustain…

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Your best bet is to use graph paper, rather than the blank they give you (unless you’ve got a starting hint, like, 1 Across is in box 3). This way you can start where you start and not have to worry about fitting it into the 17x17 (19x19, 21x21) diagram provided.

Look at the ACROSS words to get the length of your first word. For instance, if the Across words are 1, 6, 9, and 13 Across that means 1 Across is five letters (with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 going in those boxes for the Down words), 6 Across is three letters (6, 7, 8), 9 Across is four letters (9, 10, 11, 12).

Note that this doesn’t necessarily tell you how these words are arranged with respect to each other – there may be one, two, three (or more) words in the actual top row of the diagram. Work back and forth between the Across and the Down clues to start filling in the first corner – with a few Down words from your first Across word, you should be able to tell which Across word connects.

I think they’re hard – I rarely solve them. OTOH, I adore cryptics, so go figure.

twicks, puzzle editor

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Is there a way to do it in the blank they give you, without using the starting hint? When they give you that blank grid in a puzzle book/magazine, the implication seems to be that you’re supposed to use it, and that peeking at the starting hint is wimping out.

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K364 and twickster both have good advice. Looking for the middle across clue (or pair) can give you a start at the centre, then use down words to align the acrosses just above and below. They’ll be within two or three clues of the central one, so if the middle across is number 17 (or 16 and 17 if it’s a pair), you know that the acrosses above and below are in the range from 13 or 14 up to 20 or so. I still usually look at the starting-box hint, since I prefer cryptics anyway.

If you want to try cryptics, here’s a here’s a guide that might help.

(And twicks, I got the magazine, and never mailed to thank you. So: Thanks!)

9

Thank you, and OH MY LORD, I’m a ninny. A big bonk on the head to myself for not seeing that one. Geeze, I even considered “on.ed.” as a possibility; couldn’t I have put the dang period one character further to the right? :smack:

I have to admit, guys, that I used the starting hint. Can’t imagine how I’d have proceded otherwise!

My comments to K364 are added in bold:

That was really useful, K364, thanks so much!

Graph paper? Oy! Just add a compass and a protractor, and you’ll have all three components of my worst math class nightmares. :slight_smile: Seriously, those are great tips, twickster. Thank you very much! Can you share some tidbits about how you became a puzzle editor, and what that entails? Do you work for a publishing house that produces puzzle books, or for a newspaper/magazine? What sorts of puzzles do you work on?

Thanks also for the Cryptic hints there, rjk. It did “de-crypt” the puzzle clues a little, although sadly I still found myself staring stupidly at most of the test clues gapemouthed, like a particularly dim cow chewing cud.

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This still seems easier than Paint by Numbers… Thats fun, I think Im at 10% complete for all the ones I start. www.conceptis.com

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I just do them on regular paper until I figure out where the starting square goes, which you can do once you have letters filled in each of the N squares across. The NY Times used to have two diagramless puzzles, with no grids, so in those days you had to use paper.

Work on across clues, even in the middle, with lots of down words starting in them. Once you get some across letters filled in, you can often figure out where the later across words go. Of course starting from the top is easier.

There are two books of diagramless puzzles from the Times, by the way. I’ve even seen diagramless acrostics in the Middleton collections, though that was 20 years ago.

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First off, puzzle solving is – or, IMHO, should be – something you do for your own amusement. It’s not like there’s an alarm bell at the puzzle factory that goes off when someone uses a starting hint. (Uh-oh! Cheater! Red alert! Red alert!) Who’s gonna know if you need a little help to get started? More importantly – who’s gonna care? We provide starting hints for puzzles that need them. As to why we provide the size grid we do – it indicates the furthest extent of the puzzle vertically and horizontally. It would not be practical to provide a big enough grid to handle whatever starting box people worked from – that would require something like, say, a piece of graph paper. Some could argue that by providing the maximum size, we’re effectively, ah, providing a hint. :wink:

As far as a way to solve it without looking at the starting hint – the only way I can think of is to start at the middle – and this would only work on puzzles where there is are words crossing at the middle square (i.e., where there’s an odd number of clues, as K364 explains above). If the middle square is black – there are an even number of clues – there’s no way of telling (I don’t think – I’m a word person, not a math person) how far apart the two words are horizontally or vertically (IOW, what the shape of the middle black section is).

rjk – you’re welcome. Hope it gave you a smile.

choie – I work for a major publisher of puzzle magazines. We put out mostly crosswords (everything from easier than TV Guide to harder than the NYT) and word-finds, but also have a dozen “variety” titles (cryptograms, logic problems, acrostics, etc. etc. etc – basically everything that isn’t a crossword or a word-find). My main responsibility is overseeing the variety line – since I’m basically middle management, I spend a lot of time telling people what to do and then running around making sure it’s all happening according to plan. When I do get to do some editing (not as often as I’d like, frankly), it’s usually either a high-end crossword or one of the variety titles. Also, the logic titles just ended up back on my desk, after a five-year stint elsewhere – I’d be happy to get rid of them again (I can do them, it’s just not my idea of a good time). Overall, though, gotta say, it’s the coolest job in the universe.

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Meeko, was that the link you meant to post? I can’t see that it has anything to do with paint-by-numbers (I presume you mean the tomography-style puzzles, and not the coloring books where 4 is red and 2 is blue).

Also, by “mirrored and inverted”, twickster, I presume you mean rotational symmetry? As in, if you turned the grid upside down, then it’d still look the same? If so, then there’s another level of symmetry in between that and total symmetry: You could have 2-fold rotation (what I just described), 4-fold rotational symmetry (if you turn it 90 degrees sideways it looks the same) or total (if you rotate it any amount or flip it in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal mirror, it looks the same).

Also, cheap little crosswords like you see in TV Guide sometimes do have 2-letter words, but not generally for larger ones. And you’ll occasionally see a crossword with orphaned letters or without symmetry, too: Games Magazine has a crossword where the clues are in the grid itself, in the blank squares, and it follows neither rule (the hidden contest one issue was spelled out in the unchecked squares).

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Paint by Numbers, Paint By Logic, Nonograms… Sorry about the link :smack: here it is

http://www.conceptispuzzles.com
And yes, nothing to do with assigning colors to a number. Nothing that juvenile.
Just with the discussion of how to find out the black squares on a diagramless board, the same can be said for white squares on a PBN puzzle.

The two puzzles arent siblings, are possibly cousins, but the would say hi to each other at a family reuinon.

There are a few of them in Games and World of Puzzles each month.

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There are also two Conceptis books of these, with the puzzles on high quality paper.

For diagramless puzzles, it is not guaranteed that the middle row will be of maximum length. I’ve found it much better to start from the beginning.

And Chronos, the puzzles with the clues in the grid seem to be the way it is done from non-English puzzles - at least I’ve seen French and Spanish puzzles like this. I would guess that setting puzzles in these languages are much harder than in English, since they don’t have the large variety of weird spellings and loan words we do.

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I didn’t say it would – nine times out of ten, it isn’t. My point was that the center word, if there is one, will cross the center square. What else may or may not be on that line is to be determined.

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Well, yes, I know that. :slight_smile: But if it were necessary to use the starting hints, they’d be right there with the puzzle instead of hidden away in the back somewhere.

Oooooh, clever! I never thought of that. Thanks, rjk and twickster.

Which ones are harder than the NYT?

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Harder than NYT: Crossword Puzzles Only. Hard because they go ahead and use the obscure crosswordese without a blush. Not my idea of a good time, but some people love 'em.