Beneath The Surface

  PDF  -  puz  -  online  -  Solution Hope you are having a good summer! How is it already the middle of August? This puzzle falls on Friday the 13th, so a Happy Colgate Day to those of you that celebrate. The clue at 1, the seed entry, is definitely my favorite in the puzzle--it took a few weeks to get the surface to read as naturally as possible. I hope you'll get a kick out of it when you see where it leads. I tried a different black square layout in this grid, such that the Across entries starting on the left, and the Down entries from the top, have their first letters unchecked (all the answers have at least half their letters checked, however). I'm curious, does this change your solving experience? Have your say in the comments. Thanks for visiting, and enjoy the puzzle!

PDF puz online solution It's the six-month anniversary of Beneath The Surface! Thanks to all the folks who have visited this site to try out my puzzles, I hope you're having fun. This month I decided to incorporate a mini-theme to help me seed the puzzle with interesting entries. I'm really pleased with a couple of the surfaces that I managed to find for the clues here, especially 2, 3, 12, and of course 27. Hope you'll enjoy it! Check back here August 13 for a brand-new cryptic. I've also been playing with an idea for a variety cryptic bonus puzzle, so keep your eyes peeled!

  PDF puz online Solution 9x9 block cryptic for a bonus offering this month. Back with another 15x15 cryptic on July 13.

PDF  -  puz  -  online  -  solution Many thanks to Evan Jenkins for test-solving and helping me tighten up some of the clues. Hope you enjoy it!

PDF puz Online Solution I had to make a couple last-minute revisions to one of the marquee clues in this puzzle, first because its wordplay duped a grid entry (this probably isn't a puzzle killer, but I found it inelegant), and then because I accidentally slipped in an indirect anagram (which is  a no-no for many cryptic constructors, at least if you're striving to play fair with solvers). Suffice it to say there were lots of files to re-export and links to reset, but anyway, it's all here now with a couple hours to spare. I kind of like the layout here, a 28-word grid with all but two entries of length 6 or more. Hope you enjoy it!

I felt like practicing Printer's Devilry clue-writing so I made another 'impish' mini. This one is 6x6 with bars instead of blocks. Now, it turns out that Across Lite doesn't support barred crosswords (?), but PuzzleMe does. A quick tutorial in HTML editing and voila! You're welcome, computer solvers (but if you like paper solving, there's still a PDF). In my  first PD , all of the clues were examples of what could be called 'first-order' devilry, where removal of the hidden word from the clue passage only creates one new word (by joining the remaining ends of the original undevilled words). This puzzle contains several examples of higher-order devilry where the removal's effects extend beyond the resection point, such as 2A, 5A, and 4D. When making sense of these clues, the important thing to remember is that the original order of letters in the clue is unaltered .  Entries in this grid include one proper noun. Incidentally, the proper noun entry (n...

PDF PUZ online Solution Hope you enjoy this one! You can now find Beneath The Surface puzzles on Matt Gritzmacher's Daily Crossword Links newsletter! Sign up  here .