Keith Stuart is an author and journalist who has been covering video games culture for 20 years. He is the Guardian's games correspondent and his novels A Boy Made of Blocks and Days of Wonder are published by Sphere Books.
Baldur's Gate 3, Street Fighter and Lost Ark developers discuss.Read our editorial policyJoel Fagliano has always thought about puzzles. His father was an avid solver of the famed New York Times Crossword and would photocopy it every weekday for his son to solve on the train to school. When Joel was in 10th grade he started designing his own puzzles, submitting them to the NYT's crossword editor, Will Shortz."They were... quite bad," he jokes.
In terms of the process of making a Mini: you start with the words and the grid. This is true of all puzzle making. Thinking of the clues first would be a losing proposition just because of how often the words change through the process. So I do the clues last, although I do try to start with one answer that I'm interested in working in.
Yes, definitely, I want to make themes. It's hard though. The Mini is... it's not quite an art form, but if it were, you'd be painting on a tiny pinprick of a canvas. There's so little space, you can often really only do two answers that are related to each other. I had one that ran recently that had"car","van" and"bus", and they were all parallel with each other.
Yeah, you caught me with that. I'd momentarily got it into my head that the US used Video 2000 format... You know, sadly there is truth in that. A friend of mine says that I use the Mini as my diary. I'll put in a White Lotus clue and he'll be like,"oh I see you just started the new season". There are definitely seasonal things in there too. If the weather has been bleak here for a week, you might see"rainy" and"dour". I go to the laptop everyday and I see what's interesting to me, what's calling me.
You wrote an article for the NYT puzzle newsletter on the importance of seed words, and you joked about how useful the word Obama is. I just wondered, do you have a list of, say, 50 handy words that you can always fall back on to plug gaps in a grid? Ah that's interesting because when I interviewed Jonathan Knight, he talked about how the main crossword is designed to get more challenging as the week progresses. Is that not the case with the Mini - are you not trying to ramp up the difficulty each day?
But when you're reading a novel, don't you sometimes think 'oh that phrase would make a good clue' or 'that word would be a good answer'?
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