Downright Tricky #1
A puzzle where the difficulty was left up to us.
Out of Shape was our tribute to variety crossword formats that rarely if ever become cryptics, but it included some novel formats as well that we came up with and will revisit — which, to be sure, are batons that we'd be happy if other constructors ran with as well.
The same goes for today's puzzle, which is inspired by the Caleb's Inferno feature in The Atlantic. We're going to be figuring out the best possible approach to these puzzles in real time; you'll get more than of one of these throughout the next 12 months, and the next one probably won't look exactly like this. It's an experiment to see how to make it the most fun — your feedback is most certainly encouraged.
Our partner on this journey is Andy Yingst, also known as juff, who first edited us way back in Rackenfracker #4. Their blog is full of variety puzzles we admire up and down for their cleverness, and they've also had standard and variety cryptics published in The Browser, AVCX and Out of Left Field. We can assure you just from round 1 that working with them to get this idea right is going to be great — for you and for us. Test solve thanks to Andy Stilp and John Sams, as well as skaldskaparmal, about whom ... more soon.