High Treason

We hope you've found Rackenfracker Year 3 as interesting as we have. The Downright Tricky crosswords let us build something new, Parts of Speech and All Cherry, No Lemon has classic Rackenfracker flavor, and the I-guess-it’s-a-series we’re in right now has been, for us, a delightful stretch — variety cryptics with no instructions, including High Stakes, High Roller, and now High Definition.

Instructionlessness was introduced in the context of our current editor, Andy Yingst, and their practice of sometimes solving Rackenfrackers without reading the instructions. Why? Part of it is the additional challenge, but we’ve had solvers come back to us saying, “Guys, the puzzles are challenging enough, we aren’t requesting ‘additional.’” We get that, and more on that in a minute.

The other part of why Andy will solve without instructions is that it’s very easy for instructions to give too much away. For constructors, the title and instructions of a cryptic are harder to get right than the median clue, because ideally those items have no resonance on first pass but redound once you’ve solved (or mostly solved) the puzzle. In our Word▶️ series, the first puzzle is called On First — that shouldn’t raise alarms on initial read. The instructions are as bland as you please, with really just one slightly more narrowcast word choice than commonly appears in variety instructions. But upon solving the puzzle, the title and that word choice hopefully leap out at solvers as the forewarning they didn’t realize they missed.

Except … sometimes they don’t miss it. Not all variety cryptics are tooled to achieve the same goals, but very often you want there to be an “aha” moment that the solver has to unearth. It’s not as much fun if there’s gold in your first shovelful of dirt.

Tuning instructions to miss everyone at the start but still hit everyone at the end is difficult. And don’t get us wrong, we like difficult, but it’s the sort of thing you sometimes wish you could take a bye on because the stakes are high.

And so, on High Stakes, we took a bye. Hardcore spoilers from here on in if you haven’t solved that puzzle, or its follow-up High Roller, and of course we’d dearly love you to do so, so please consider bookmarking this for catching up with afterward. (NB: No spoilers here for today’s puzzle, High Definition.)

High Stakes started with its grid — 32 numbers with an eight-square ring around each, and around the grid in the northwesternmost, northeasternmost, southeasternmost and southwesternmost corners, it spells out Minesweeper, the game that served as the puzzle’s inspiration. On the heels of the grid concept itself was the further idea that the enumeration shouldn’t be the actual enumeration.

Instead, a la Minesweeper, the enumeration should be the number of mines surrounding each of the numbers. So as solvers solved clues, the underlying linear relationship — for instance, every 6-letter answer has an “enumeration” of (2) — would begin to reveal itself. 

It would reveal itself, that is, if we didn’t call attention to it. Explicit instructions that said “the enumerations given are the difference of eight minus the length of the answer” would be helpful, but also confounding, and would make us further state that “blank spaces in a word do not necessarily appear together or at the word’s end.”

For our money, all of that foofaraw complicates the matter of the solver asking “why?,” which is the whole point. Likewise, those four corners were shaded so that the solver could see the theme answer emerge upon solving, but instructions were not needed to tell the solver some squares were shaded.

And so what instructions would have remained? “Answers go around their numbers either clockwise or counterclockwise.” That can be a tough one to intuit, especially for solvers who are hesitant to put anything down “in pencil.” But as we kept baking the puzzle, going instruction-free seemed more and more like the route for success — not because we wanted to deprive solvers of instructions, but because the puzzle presented solvers with everything needed to derive what was going on, and “explaining” it would only muddy the solvers' path.

But we couldn’t resist a soupçon of forewarning: The 😬 emoji is used in the classic Windows implementation of Minesweeper when you click on a square but have not yet released the click, and that became the entirety of the instructions.

This is already too long, so let us quickly say that High Roller had a more troubled existence. Continuing with the previous puzzle's idea of playing with the enumerations, we liked the idea having them here indicate the scoring zones of Skee-Ball, but how to do it? For instance, might the point be for the solver to identify where in the grid the boundaries of each rings are? We’ll just say that up until its penultimate draft, the grid was rotated 90˚ so the theme entry SKEE BALL ran vertically and not horizontally, and the vertical answers weren’t entered upside down. 

Part of our assurance that High Roller would be OK is that with grid numbers and grid lines given — again, not a feature of every previous draft — it was solvable as a crossword with “only” the unusual features that all of the Downs were in fact Ups (toward which we tipped our hat by calling them “Verticals”) and that the Verticals had inaccurate enumerations (that could nevertheless be accurately ascertained from their grid). Honestly, that puzzle was probably another draft or two away from its ideal implementation, but we find it charming as published.

And as published, instructions could only have complicated matters. We wouldn’t want to tip the big secret about the Ups, and everything else was just flavor that supported the theme entry. And so, rather than token instructions, we just gave that puzzle 🪙 instructions.

That said — the puzzles want to be solved. If in any puzzle we’ve pushed you into a corner where you can’t make progress, you’re welcome to reach out to hello at therackenfracker dot com, and we’ll respond with our best nudge.