Constructor: Sande Milton and Jeff Chen
Relative difficulty: Easy (3:28)
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THEME: MIXED BAG (35D: Assortment ... or a description of 32-, 39 and 42-Across?)— I guess in Scrabble™ you keep your TILES in a bag ... where they are mixed ... up. So TILES and STILE and ISLET are anagrams of each other ... because "bag" means "bag of tiles" and so TILES gets anagrammed twice ... this actually makes zero sense from a Scrabble perspective, but whatever, it's a kind of play on words. Then there are various Scrabble-related words around the grid, including SCRABBLE (31D: Game described by this puzzle's four racks), all of which are clued [Rack #_: (scrambled answer)]—actually, these seven-letter words form a sentence when taken in order: PLAYERS ARRANGE JUMBLED LETTERS.
Theme answers:
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Did you know 17x13 grids have four fewer squares than 15x15 grids? I figured this out through multiplication. Congratulate me. But it's kinda sorta interesting, in that the weird over/under-sized grid ends up being almost exactly the same number of squares as the standard one. I was trying to account for my fast time. I think the primary issue is a. it's just easy, and b. the [Rack] clues are non-clues. Far, far harder to get from a real clue to an answer than to anagram 7 letters. I do the damn Jumble™ every day. I anagram every dang sign I see. [Rack blah blah blah] is not a clue. It's a gimme. Also, those Rack clues make no sense. How are you getting from [Rack...] to whatever it's called when you use all your letters. Bingo? I don't know, man, I hate Scrabble™something fierce. Anyway, I figured out that the clue wanted me to use all the letters on the [Rack]s, but ... just saying [Rack] seems inadequate. This thing is conceptually a total mess. It's trying to do too much, and doing none of it particularly well. You've got the one core gag (MIXED BAG = bag of tiles, ergo The tiles in TILES are "MIXED" up thrice in the middle of the grid. But obviously that is a very slight theme, so the grid gets this radical segmentation, and then super-boring Scrabble-related words get their own section of the grid and their own [Rack...] clue, which, as I've said, both makes the puzzle super-easy *and* doesn't make a ton of sense, conceptually. I am sad I didn't get to blog yesterday's puzzle now. And you know things are bad when I am regretting the opportunity to blog a Tuesday.
The fill is kind of a MIASMA of oldenness. I haven't seen ALB in a dog's age. The OKRA ORCA I see much more often. SAS DST AGEE INCA ABIE ugh I'm bored already. Trust me, there's more of it. And USROUTE??? Oy. SABOTEURS is a cool word (4D: Some counterintelligence targets), and much of the rest of the longer fill is tolerable, but between the all-over-the-map theme and the crushing olde-timey routineness of much of the fill, there just wasn't much for me to enjoy today. And yet I do want to give some points for trying. This theme was at least unusual, as was the grid shape. If you're gonna screw up, better to screw up going big than going safe.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. UNCUT BARRE made me laugh. Not a great day for UNCUT BARR(E).
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Easy (3:28)
Theme answers:
- PLAYERS (20A: Rack #1: AELPRSY)
- ARRANGE (25D: Rack #2: AAEGNRR)
- JUMBLED (56A: Rack #3: BDEJLMU)
- LETTERS (23D: Rack #4: EELRSTT)
Ávila (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈaβila]; Latin: Abula) is a Spanish town located in the autonomous community of Castile and León, and is the capital of the Province of Ávila.It is sometimes called the Town of Stones and Saints, and it claims that it is one of the towns with the highest number of Romanesque and Gothic churches per capita in Spain. It has complete and prominent medieval town walls, built in the Romanesque style. The town is also known as Ávila de los Caballeros, Ávila del Reyand Ávila de los Leales (Ávila of the Knights, the King and the Loyalists), each of these epithets being present in the town standard.Orson Welles once named Ávila as the place in which he would most desire to live, calling it a "strange, tragic place", while writer José Martínez Ruiz, in his book El alma castellana (The Castilian Soul), described it as "perhaps the most 16th-century town in Spain".It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985. (wikipedia)
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The fill is kind of a MIASMA of oldenness. I haven't seen ALB in a dog's age. The OKRA ORCA I see much more often. SAS DST AGEE INCA ABIE ugh I'm bored already. Trust me, there's more of it. And USROUTE??? Oy. SABOTEURS is a cool word (4D: Some counterintelligence targets), and much of the rest of the longer fill is tolerable, but between the all-over-the-map theme and the crushing olde-timey routineness of much of the fill, there just wasn't much for me to enjoy today. And yet I do want to give some points for trying. This theme was at least unusual, as was the grid shape. If you're gonna screw up, better to screw up going big than going safe.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
P.S. UNCUT BARRE made me laugh. Not a great day for UNCUT BARR(E).
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]