EV1664
Downhill by Vagans
Setter’s Blog
Extra letters give HIGHLIGHT THREE SKI LOCATIONS WITH STRAIGHT LINES; answers in alternate rows are entered backwards.
Downhill by Vagans, a Setter’s Blog
The theme for this puzzle was born when I realised back in April that I needed a new one to send in to the EV, and was chatting to a fellow setter (you’ll guess who) who is seriously into ski-ing. That brought the zig-zag path of skiers down the slopes to mind and my first idea was to have the names a few of these snaking their way down the grid. especially CHUENISBÄRGLI for its 13 letters and striking spelling. It’s a famous World Cup slope but hardly a household name and would have been a solver’s nightmare to find, so a re-think was needed.
Meanwhile I’d been experimenting with some of the features of the crossword-setting programs, using reversals in a recent one based on Alice Through the Looking-Glass. I’d seen quite a few constructions based on boustrophedon over the years, in which alternate lines flow right and left, and, which that could represent thematically. Yes: those could represent the skier’s zig-zagging movement, and add enough complication to just put the names of three slopes on the diagonals. With both those gimmicks in play any message generation had to be straightforward so I went for the well-used extra letter generated by the wordplay to spell out the need to HIGHLIGHT THREE SKI LOCATIONS WITH STRAIGHT LINES.
As is my won’t, I wrote a whimsical preamble beginning “It’s downhill all the way now for Vagans, and the path on the slippery slope is not straightforward, as the (thematic) treatment of some across entries shows.” Our esteemed editor and an awful lot of setters prefer their preambles to do more of saying what they mean and less of not quite meaning what they say, so a plain Jane version appeared in the end, also correcting the cell count of the highlighting which my number/date dyslexia always manages to scramble.
I hope solvers enjoyed the exercise and managed to find their way safely to the bottom of the hill, and that the PDM about the reversed lines came at about the right time, and the names of the diagonals were obviously enough flagged and placed to be discoverable even if they were new.
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A full review of this puzzle can be seen over on fifteensquared.