He regularly contributes work to The AV Crossword Club, Bawdy Crosswords, Spirit Magazine, Visual Thesaurus, and The Weekly Dig. Brendan's puzzles have also appeared in every major market including Creators Syndicate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Crosswords Club, Dell Champion, Games Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Sun, Tribune Media Services, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. In fact, he's the sixth-most published constructor in The New York Times under Will Shortz's editorship. Please enable JavaScript if you would like to comment on this blog.īrendan Emmett Quigley has been a professional puzzlemaker since 1996. Crosswords is a much safer retreat for the human brain. Chess has been completely taken over by computers in the past 20 years - even Magnus Carlsen is helpless in the face of the silicon monsters, and the gap grows every year. Yes, when I was a teenager, but I'm glad that chess didn't work out as a profession for me and that crosswords has. Santora, Mike Shenk, Jordan Lasher and Stan Newman.īEQ: Was there a time that you thought you'd be a chess master instead of a puzzle god? I thought this category of puzzle was due for a revival and would be helpful in addressing the 'theme crisis.' Plus I figured the idea of a contest would up the interactivity quotient on my planned site.īEQ: Other than Albert and Hook, who were some of your crossword heroes? While searching for a solution to this I recalled how much I'd enjoyed solving Eric Albert's contest crosswords in Dell Champion Crossword Puzzles in the early 1990s and Henry Hook's meta-crosswords in his Hooked on Puzzles book series around the same time. Novel theme ideas grew tougher and tougher to come by, and I'd lost my creative flow what had been an intellectual passion was turning into just a job. Matt: Around 2007 I started to get kind of bored with writing crosswords. Dave Sullivan's recent changes to the site (he instituted the new system of submissions, which saved my Gmail account) have made negotiating this growth much simpler.īEQ: What made you decide to go the meta route? Were that rate of growth to continue, then by the time the feature ends in August of 2027 I will count every past, present and future member of the human race as MGWCC solvers. In its first four years the main metrics have grown by 35-55% annually (Google Group members, record number of entries, traffic, tip jar haul). Next week I've got some time set aside for a SEXTUPLE PANGRAM puzzle.

Note also how similar my grid is to Wentz's, and that I was able to work in a tribute to him (a grid entry that's one letter off from his name). Be prepared for some questionable fill and many proper names of Germanic and Eastern European origin. I wound up writing about 8 full grids, and this was the best. The result of those two days is today's puzzle, which is six letters shy of being a quint pangram (two V's, two Y's, a J and a P). It looked impossible, but this summer I spent two full workdays obsessed with making it work. My hypercompetitive side kicked in, and I thought: can I do a QUINTUPLE PANGRAM? It would also have to be a 16x15 of course. It was a 16x15 to accommodate its central entry, but still that was an amazing feat. Then in 2010, Peter Wentz had a puzzle in the Times that had QUADRUPLE PANGRAM as its central entry, and each letter of the alphabet appeared at least four (!) times in the grid. Matt: It's a good story: in 1998 I had a puzzle in the NYT where the central entry was TRIPLE PANGRAM, and each letter of the alphabet appeared at least three times in the grid.

Onto the interview.īEQ: Seriously, what the hell were you thinking when you made this guest puzzle grid? Grab a copy of Matt's latest book when you're done with this, okay? Okay.

Which reminds me, SPOILER ALERT!! Matt will be talking about this puzzle in the Q&A, so you've been warned! And yes, I meant tour de farce you'll understand once you've solved it. And when one of your heroes sends you a tour de farce, you just have to run it. I'm pleased to have a guest puzzle one of my crosswording heroes, Matt Gaffney.

Matt gaffney nyt crosswords