Handa said in an email, “I solve 99 percent of puzzles digitally, which got me thinking about a concept that only works on paper. When asked about the inspiration behind this concept, Ms. Sympathetic to other printerless solvers, she even offered to send the puzzle printout by mail when she self-published it last year. She constructed the puzzle itself using PowerPoint. Handa doesn’t own a printer, so prototypes and refinements this puzzle required multiple trips to a copy store, she said. That got me thinking about a layered meta puzzle, where different steps, such as opening and closing a cootie catcher, would lead you to some sort of final answer.” A meta puzzle is built from other puzzles and uses their solutions to guide a solver to one overall answer. But my testers said they didn’t see the point in making a cootie catcher if they weren’t going to use it. “It was simply a crossword puzzle - clues, grid and all - that needed to be folded into the right shape in order to be solvable. “The first draft of this puzzle looked very, very different,” she said. Handa told me her production and fabrication process was just as hands-on, involving several designs and iterations. Part of the joy of solving this one for me was its physicality, and it’s delightfully intuitive and “hands on.” It took me a good few minutes of examining the cut-out square in my hands, turning it around and folding it lightly, not daring to make a wrong crease as I studied the mysterious markings and geometry of the layout.įittingly, Ms. Shifting forward 16 characters from YBSQKWS yielded our one-word answer. With the red square in the upper left corner, the circled letters now read TINYURL DOT COM SLASH YBSQKWS, or /ybsqkws, and typing that into my browser finally brings up the crossword grid! Once completed, the theme answers reveal instructions for using the device to uncover the correct fortune, “eROT16” a web search reveals that this indicates a rotation cipher, to “rotate forward 16 letters.” The text to be decoded was there all along, after the slash in the tiny URL.
The answer: the cootie catcher! Looking at the colorful word search again while the device is assembled reveals a different arrangement of letters. “Spa veggies!” “Mani option!” But where is the crossword? Where could this puzzle’s grid be hiding, or where could I extract the information I’d need to make the next step? I turn over the page and continue folding in corners when I finally recognize the object in my hands - a fortune teller, also charmingly known as a cootie catcher! I finish folding and discover to my delight that as I use the device, the clues printed inside are finally legible.
#First new york times crossword editor crossword clue how to#
But how to use any of this information remains a mystery. One clue reads “Barnya,” which I immediately know goes with another: “rd female,” because I’ve seen EWE clued so many times in crossword puzzles. The square of paper needs to be manipulated and reoriented so that these clues will come together, and the title tells me how. There are triangular pockets of words in numbered sections that are instantly recognizable as crossword clues, even though they’re cut up and scattered around the page. While not technically a crossword, this puzzle makes effective use of familiar conventions, such as distinctively short clues for common answers, while asking us to interpret them in three-dimensional space. There are no instructions, and aside from the title and author, the only other writing outside the square reads, “The answer to this puzzle is one word.” The puzzle never mentions scissors or cutting, but it’s fairly obvious it’s something to try.
This puzzle uses intuitive visual clues to guide the solver.