What makes some puzzles come out very hard, while others tend to be easy? You can go into the project trying to accomplish one or the other, and you might succeed, or you can just fill in the grid and see what happens. There are tricks to making puzzles easier: putting in shorter words, less dense interlock, simpler definitions. To make it harder, you mostly have to follow your natural hyper-vicious instincts (and I think most puzzle-makers are sadists at heart) and not actively work at making it easy. Having a lot of theme words, or long theme words, helps too, since it makes for a very crowded grid. This week, I (mostly) didn’t hold back, and the result is a puzzle that my testers found particularly challenging. (I reined in the difficulty a little bit as a result, but I still had to pass out the Advil to compensate for the headaches that resulted from the testing process.) Maybe you’ll find it easier — solvers tend to be a hardy bunch — but you’ll probably find at least one clue and one fill word to hate me for before you are finished filling. Won’t that be a nice reward for both of us?
Title: Thin Pretense
Difficulty: Friday
Download: Across Lite or printable PNG (w/ solution)