word puzzle

Once again, I am posting a day early, this time due to DASH. I love outdoor puzzle hunt season!

Not my best effort, I'm afraid. I liked the crossing of the seed entries in Row 1/Band A, but the fill elsewhere suffered. I try to stick to words of 4 or more letters when writing a Marching Bands puzzle, but this time -- well, you'll see.

Posting on Friday this week, because I will be at BAPHL 7 tomorrow. Been a while since I tried a Some Assembly Required. Hope you enjoy it!

This is a new (to me) puzzle type, shamelessly ripped from the pages of Mike Selinker and Thomas Snyder's excellent book Puzzlecraft. It's like a spiral puzzle, in that the same letters are used going forwards and backwards in different words, but it has a different topology, as you will see. Thanks for the inspiration, Mike!

As hinted at previously, here is the second of my paired Pathfinders. As a form, the Pathfinder is rather interesting to me. When I set out to write a Pathfinder, it usually comes together fairly quickly, at least as far as variety crosswords of this complexity go. And yet, I still feel like I'm stuck in the learning curve. I have a hard time filling the outer edges of the grid in interesting (to me) ways, and I seem to fall into similar patterns of overlapping 5- and 6-letter words. It would be nice if I can show some improvement in the future. At any rate, I hope you enjoy the puzzle.

This might just be my last spiral. I seem to be getting into the same sorts of "crossings" over and over, and I'm running out of new words to fit these crossings. But never fear, for I will be introducing a new puzzle type soon, one that I picked up from Mike Selinker and Thomas Snyder's excellent book Puzzlecraft.

I actualy had another Pathfinder puzzle that I finished before this one, but noticed that a couple of entries suggested a natural progression from  this puzzle to the other. In the case of what will be the second puzzle, it was my seed entry, but not in this case, although it was an immediate consequence of the seed. Enjoy!

I neglected to announce that I'm back to posting a new puzzle each week. Hopefully I can maintain this pace for a good while. If you've only been stopping by every fortnight, be sure to check out last week's Rows Garden as well. Acknowledgements to Patrick Berry for the puzzle type.

Here's a puzzle I had lined up before my winter hiatus. Given how difficult Rows Garden puzzles are for me to write, I'm pretty happy with this one. I'm a bit disappointed that I had to resort to a pluralized surname in one of the Bloom entries, but the alternative would have necessitated a clue starting with "type of fortification," and that's never a good sign. Maybe next time I'll get those little wrinkles ironed out. Acknowledgements to Patrick Berry for the puzzle type.

Well, well, another DIY Criss-Cross? I haven't done one of these in quite a while. I'm not sure about the difficulty level on this one, so I included a second version with one entry filled in to get you started. Acknowledgements to Trip Payne for the puzzle type.