The Three-Boddy Problem
This is getting serious.
If you are reading this in the present, welcome, the present has always been our favorite temporal dimension. If you are reading this in the future — specifically, after our next cryptic is published by AVCX on Thursday, May 28, and you're coming from AVCX and finding us for the first time — welcome! We've been publishing for more than three years now, and won the Variety Cryptic Crossword of the Year award for our puzzle High Definition. We have plenty of free crosswords and, every month, a crossword just for subscribers, like this one.
It's a journey for puzzle solvers to become cryptic crossword constructors, and a further journey for those constructors to become variety cryptic constructors. On that journey, there are some common early stops — playing with numerals (Roman or Arabic), completing the set (sins, wonders, dwarves), and, yes, invoking the board game and/or movie Clue.
As such, this is actually not our first Clue-themed variety cryptic — we wrote that one more than 15 years ago. It was a run-before-we-could-walk 15×18 behemoth that gave up its secrets too easily — the pro we sent it to for testing cried uncle about halfway through.
A formative lesson. Some wags familiar with our harder puzzles might quip we haven't taken it to heart, but believe us, it informs every variety puzzle we endeavor upon, including today's. So welcome back to the manor; hope you remember how to get from the conservatory to the lounge.
Thanks to our test solvers Andy Stilp, John Sams and Dave Sanderman; our editor Andy Yingst; multihyphenate Kelsey Dixon, who enlivened today's illustration; and benevolent demigod Alex Boisvert, at whose site Crossword Nexus today's puzzle is hosted, and who like Prometheus goes out and brings back technological progress on behalf of the benighted constructing masses without regard to what Zeus might do to his liver.