A few of you “newbies” – and I’m using this term to cover, in some cases, up to four years :) – have recently expressed, er, well… lamented that with the archives going away, there are a lot of puzzles you never got to, and now, might never get to (though there is still a chance, right?). So I thought I’d throw together some of my puzzles from the archives. Specifically, old ones (I didn’t include anything from the last two years)

April 20, 2007 – OWW
https://www.tanga.com/puzzles/319
This was my DAY 4 puzzle of a week-long puzzle “hunt” that renfurdson let me do, back before I was an Admin here. This was, I think, the second of the six puzzles that I wrote (the seventh being the meta-puzzle), and when I wrote this, I didn’t fully have my meta in place, which was good… since it allowed me to focus entirely on the idea here and not worry about what the answer “had” to be.

This one took me a crazy long time trying to find clues that worked well enough, and I’m pretty happy with how it came out… though even to this day, I’m not entirely sure if a no-numbers version might be more fun :)

September 8, 2007 – Hypercross
https://www.tanga.com/crossword_puzzles/151
My very first Hyper, and one that I have used as an example maybe 30-35 times over the years when modding someone’s HUGE 20+ answer Hyper that they submitted. I’m not claiming this one is amazing or anything, but I’ve sent this link to many an author over the years as proof that a Hyper can absolutely have fewer than 10 clues and still be fun. A huge part of any Hyper, IMO, is its idea/solve paradigm. And if that’s interesting enough, a small batch of “perfect” clues is always better than a large batch of “basically works” clues, clues that sometimes felt, to me, like they were filler to get to over 10 answers.

September 13, 2007 – Hypercross
https://www.tanga.com/crossword_puzzles/170
My second Hyper, and, I believe the first one to do this idea (which has been done many times over the years). I will admit that I have gone back a few times and cleaned up this puzzle – the first time to redo a few clues that gave a few people trouble, and then years later when duckpond’s WordCrosser was available (heh, in my day, you had to make your Hyper grid by HAND) to force some more helpful crossings. I knew even then that #10 was maybe gonna be a hiccup, but I was younger then, and less experienced :)

September 21, 2007 – Hypercross
https://www.tanga.com/crossword_puzzles/188
I liked this one from the get-go, and I was pretty sure from the moment I got the idea for it, that it was a potential winner. Of all my Hypers, this is my highest rated one for FUN, and is the other Hyper I would sometimes send to authors to show how just 9 answers can totally work.

September 23, 2007 – Hypercross
https://www.tanga.com/crossword_puzzles/205
Heh, another idea that’s been done multiple times here over the years. Of course, here I went crazy with 18 clues :) And yeah, I went back and polished this one up, too – a few better images and a duckpond make-over. This was the Hyper, though, that kinda made me realize I had a specific style going: Hypers in which you solved the clue for its answer… and then that answer led you to a different answer that you typed into the grid. I haven’t actually gone through and crunched the numbers, but I’ll bet something like 85% of my Hypers follow this paradigm.

January 28, 2008 – Hypercross
https://www.tanga.com/crossword_puzzles/636
If you like this one, I did a leftovers sequel the very next day (because I was trying not to create another HUGE Hyper: https://www.tanga.com/crossword_puzzles/601)

February 18, 2008 – OWW
https://www.tanga.com/puzzles/2713
I don’t know if this was our first Quartet (this was back in the day when we published 2 OWWs every night – and Easy and a Hard. This was the Easy), but I’ve always loved the simplicity of this one… and I recently found an old TG from back then, Feb 19, 2008, between me and Scoutmom in which I apparently told her the origins for this Quartet (I’d forgotten all of this, of course, so it was cool to stumble into this TG):

“Actually, here’s a related story: I wrote that Mount Rushmore puzzle back in… November, I think (maybe October)… and THAT VERY NIGHT there was a Tanga puzzle in which [idea redacted] was used! It wasn’t “hidden,” so the puzzles were different enough, and yet, in a way, they were exactly the same.

So I decided to sit on mine for a while. And after about a month, I mostly forgot about it, until around January, and then I thought, “Hey, this is kind of perfect for President’s Day.” Which led to trying to write an all-themed President’s Day.

So if that puzzle hadn’t gone up that night, I would never have done those other three… including the one we were talking about."

February 28, 2008 – Hypercross
https://www.tanga.com/crossword_puzzles/680
The secret to this one – and the breakthrough for me that made me feel it was okay to go ahead and try it – was the idea of just putting the instructions in clue #1, and having that not be a clue per se. If you read Comment #1, you’ll see that I came back to this one years later and just deleted the “problem” clue :)

April 1, 2009 – OWW
https://www.tanga.com/puzzles/4561
I had done all the April Fool’s puzzles the year before, but this was the first time I really got tricky with it. I can’t tell you, though, how much I wish I could edit my comment #7 to something a bit more elegant… but doing so would have always changed the date/time stamp on it… and that just wasn’t worth it to me in the long run.

April 1, 2010 – OWW
https://www.tanga.com/puzzles/6177
This, however, was arguably the best of my April Fool’s puzzles. And I suspect will be the one (hopefully one of the ones) that’ll likely be my most remembered puzzle. Which is fine, as I could not have been more pleased with how this one turned out. Ahh… the benefits of power :)

May 4, 2011 – Cryptopix
https://www.tanga.com/puzzles/8178
While I’ve done 44 Cryptos, I’ve never really been fond of any of them :) For some reason, that format just never spoke to me… and while I’m fairly happy with many of the ones I’ve done, the ones I like the most are the more puzzle-y, format-breaking ones like this one. Or this: https://www.tanga.com/puzzles/2689.

February 18, 2008 – Cryptopix
https://www.tanga.com/puzzles/2712
Though this one, from that President’s Day Quartet, is probably my favorite “normal” Crypto. I think what I like most about it is how clean it is – no word math, no letter blocking… and the answer words spread across multiple images.

December 10, 2009 – Hypercross
https://www.tanga.com/crossword_puzzles/1475
And finally, I think this might be my favorite of all my Hypers. I think the idea/aha is both fun and fair (even with #14 in there :P). I love that I was able to run the gamut on using all the various “versions” of the idea. And I like that the clues are a nice mix of straight-forward and whimsical. Whimsical is what I always tried for, but as some of you know, “trying for” and “finding” are two different things… and that difference can sometimes be MILES apart.