Word Salad | The Nation

[First off, links to the current puzzle, solving guidelines, and Braze’s solver’s blog]

Fans of cryptic crosswords face a constant and grim economic law, which is that—in the United States, at least—demand always outstrips supply. Journalistic outlets for cryptics are few and far between, and although there are a handful of published collections available, many of us ran through those long ago.

So we were happy to discover, during last month’s annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League, the arrival of a fine new compendium of no fewer than fifty variety cryptics. This self-published collection is the work of Roger Wolff, a former Microsoft programmer now pursuing a doctorate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and they’re high-quality creations, with well-made grids, solid clues and entertaining gimmicks. Admittedly, the range of gimmicks is a little narrow—most of the puzzles involve altering a subset of entries in accordance with some thematic principle—but the number of variations Wolff comes up with on that basic idea is impressive, and he follows through deftly on each of them.