wordplay 2.0, the [not actually real] crossword column

Cheeky Laugh

Looking for a shift in perspective.

By Lili Wilson

Jump to: This Puzzle's Theme | Interesting Clues

THE PUZZLE — I am going to start this one out with a moment of deep honesty: I am writing this column six months after I wrote the crossword. The puzzle felt incomplete without a space to talk through a bit of my thought process, and I was actually really proud of this one and want to do it full justice.

After constructing my first crossword last December, I wanted my second to be more accessible theme-wise. Although it was a lot of fun constructing a very niche crossword, after getting a taste of how fun it is to share a puzzle you've written with the world, I hoped to maximize the number of friends and family who could try this one.

I got the idea for this puzzle some time early last summer. I taught a few lessons on encryption last January when I was teaching at a high school in Nuremberg, Germany, and ever since then have been very attracted to the idea of a cipher-based crossword. After the spring semester ended and I finally had more time on my hands, I started envisioning what this might actually look like during subway rides to work in lower Manhattan.

This crossword is inspired by the Caesar cipher, a very old (and insecure) form of encryption that involves shifting every letter in a piece of plaintext by a constant amount to obtain an encrypted message. The shifting operation done in this "secret procedure" is also often referred to as a CAESAR SHIFT (37A).

Of the five vertical themed clues in this puzzle, one contains a piece of information that is crucial to figuring out the rest of them. "The key to deciphering this puzzle's theme" is TWO (60D), which is the shift value that was used as the key when encrypting the answers to the other four theme clues. Take each of these four themed clue answers and shift every letter back by two, and you get the "deciphered" version of the puzzle.

I had a bit of fun with the four vertical clues, making them all Caesar-related before shifting them. My hope with this was that it would help lead people towards the CAESAR SHIFT by getting Caesar on the brain.

The "First name of a famously betrayed leader" is JULIUS, which shifted becomes LWNKWU (3D); the "Latter part of a delivery method" is a SECTION (from "Caesarian section"), which shifted becomes UGEVKQP (11D); the "Prefix of a popular pizza chain" is LITTLE (for Little Caesar's), which shifted becomes NKVVNG (46D); and "A dish often served with croutons" is a SALAD (specifically, a Caesar one), which shifted becomes UCNCF (50D).

I love how weird this puzzle looks. You could say that these four strange and consonant-heavy words (likely) had their crossword debut here!

During construction, I grappled with tuning the difficulty of the across clues. My hope was to make them easy enough that pretty early on in the solving process, the solver would have a moment of realization that something really strange must be going on with the vertical clues. Since this theme is a bit unconventional, I wanted to give people acrosses they could feel confident in! Cluing difficulty is something I am still very inexperienced with, and would like to practice more in the future.

I also spent a while trying to pick a good shift value! The shifted answers often resulted in many strange consonants, resulting in grids that were not easy to fill out due to a litany of Q's, K's, and V's. I ended up going with two because the resulting grid was not horrific to fill out, and because it is small enough that most solvers could apply this shift to answers in their heads.

16A. "Popular blocky game" is MINECRAFT. This is not a particularly innovative clue, but I was glad I could sneak this childhood obsession of mine into this puzzle.

10D. "One with a burning passion" is an ARSONIST. I took this clue from another puzzle, because I love it.

44D. "What you need to do to collect 200" is PASS GO.

55D. "Cheeky laugh" is HEH. I was doing a lot of this while constructing this puzzle.

59A. "What someone on Twitch might record and upload later, informally" is a STREAM VID. In my opinion, this is the most interesting non-theme clue in this puzzle, because it is secretly holding the entire grid together. As I discussed earlier, the shifted answers made filling in this grid somewhat challenging, and I resorted to this somewhat suspect clue/answer pair to make everything work out. Some friends have pointed out to me that "STREAM VOD" is a better answer to this clue and I hear you, I really do, but ELAINE (47D) really needed an I and "VID" still makes some sense.

Since I am the constructor as well as Wordplay 2.0's only columnist, this section will be short.

This puzzle was even more fun than the last to work on! Again, always open to feedback, suggestions, tips, etc. If you tried, I hope you enjoyed the puzzle!

Lili Wilson enjoys crosswords and fooling around with HTML files in her free time. She hopes it isn't illegal to copy the Wordplay column like this.