Holiday-themed miniature diagramless

[rhu]

Across
1. Start of a message
6. Get used to
7. Kings, like Achashverosh
8. Taste wine, not like Achashverosh
9. Dorothy’s Auntie and her namesakes

Down
1. Belonging to that man
2. Seed used in cooking. (Esther might have eaten it in the palace)
3. End of the message
4. Gets ready, informally
5. What Vashti didn’t say

Comments

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

Cute! And thank you!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Are they all five-letters? Because the obvious answers for 9 and for 5 are both three letters . . . .

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

They are not all five letters. That's why I tagged it "diagramless" and not "square." The grid does have left-right reflective symmetry.

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

I took it as a very low-resolution drawing of an appropriate item.

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

I'm having trouble getting "My koala needs a new coat of paint" to fit in 5D.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Have you tried writing really really small?

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

Easy for you, Mr. 530nm.

[cellio]

I don't grok the form. I think I've figured out that 1A is the first row and spawns all of the downs (meaning that 1A must be at least 9 letters for spacing???), and then on lower rows we get 6, 7, etc., but that leaves an awful lot of possibilities. Am I missing something, or is that in fact the challenge?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

1A can't be 9 letters, because there are only 5 down clues and the crossword follows standard American crossword rules.

The limit of 5 down clues means that the puzzle must be exactly 5 columns wide; the five across clues (given the constraint imposed by the down clues in this case) mean that the puzzle is also five rows deep. Given that I've already told you it's not a square, and given that standard American crossword rules disallow two-letter words, there are only two possible grids:

12345       12345
6....       6....
7....   or  7....
8....       X8..X
X9..X       X9..X

(where X marks a black square and . marks an empty white square).

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Hadn't thought of that. Next year....

[cellio]

Thank you. I don't know standard rules so I was inferring based on casual exposure to actual puzzles, and for some reason I thought you couldn't have large blocks of letters together like that. I also had thought that you could have downs that start in rows other than the first, so long as the numbers stayed in order, so you could have something like:

1...x
.Xxx2
.3xx.

(etc)

Thanks for the education in design rules. (Glad to see that the obvious answer to 1A fits...)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

For a larger puzzle, you almost certainly would have clues starting on lines other than the first.

The basic rules of American crossword grids are:

1. The grid must not be divided into non-interlocking regions.
2. Every letter must be part of both an across and a down word.
3. Every word must have at least three letters.
4. The grid is almost always symmetrical; the symmetry is almost
always 180-degree rotation about the center, althoug
diagramlesses often have reflective symmetry instead.
5. Numbers are assigned in left-to-right top-to-bottom order
regardless of whether a cell starts an across word, a down
word, or both.
6. Maximum number of black squares: Rav and Shmuel disagree.
One says, no more than 1/6 of the squares may be black, and
one says the word count is more important than the black
square count.

[cellio]

Every letter must be part of both an across and a down word.

Every letter? Wow, did not know. I was thinking more like Scrabble, where you often have letters that are only part of one word.

Rav and Shmuel disagree.

*giggle*

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Yep, every letter --- in standard American grids. In cryptics, and in other countries, so-called "unchecked" letters are common. And in America, the Scrabble-style puzzles are generally called criss-cross puzzles, and are more targeted at kids learning vocabulary words. Occasionally you'll see a puzzle that breaks the rules (for example, last Saturday's NYT puzzle had four seemingly unchecked squares) but generally that's for a particular reason.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the cute puzzle, and the s.m.! (We'll have to try to coordinate better next year - my mom called and said she had s.m. there for us, so we added a loop to our route to pick it up. If I'd known we were doing that, we could have delivered yours in person, instead of mailing it. Ah well.)