All-Stars
My world's on fire, how 'bout yours?
Welcome, and a special hello to new subscribers — you'll find our collection of free puzzles here, and our subscriber puzzles here.
We had a couple of opportunities to make a special puzzle — one to be available at the 2026 National Puzzlers League convention, and one to be solved on the monthly cryptic Twitch salon hosted by Hayley Gold, Al Sanders and Will Nediger — and we decided we'd roll them into one extra-special puzzle: This one.
The NPL convention, which dadgumituh attended, was a high time of playful bonhomie, and the Twitch solve of this crossword with those hosts and their guests Katie Hamill (treasurer of the NPL) and Bob Weisz (cryptic constructor who has edited two puzzles with our bylines) was also terrific. You can watch the VOD for the next few weeks … but maybe after you've taken the opportunity to solve it yourself?
Thanks to Roger Wolff, who kicked off this phase of our constructing careers when we pitched a puzzle for one of his Cryptic All-Stars (no relation) collections, and who was gracious enough to edit this puzzle; and also as always to our test solving crew, with a special nod to Dob Olino of Crossweird and Rackenfracker main character Andy Yingst for their help working on what the digital implementation for this puzzle should look like — online solvers may want to take a look at the actual grid (see below) to get acquainted with its concept so that the online version makes more sense. This is also our first puzzle that we're publishing on the Crossweird solver, for which Dob added a couple of display filigrees to bring it all together.
