Tutorial: Grid Manipulation

Not all tricky puzzles require complicated wordlist shenanigans to successfully fill. Sometimes you can make your life a lot easier by simply manipulating the grid shape while constructing. Even if you're constructing a 15x15, it might be easier to fill by working on a larger canvas.

Let's take a look at Patrick Blindauer's brilliant DOUBLE FEATURE puzzle from 2013:

 This is one of my all-time favorite puzzles, and I still clearly remember it blowing my mind when I first solved it. How someone ever dreamed it up, let alone dared to stitch it together so cleanly, was beyond my comprehension.

Looking back now, constructing it doesn't seem quite as Sisyphean. Instead of treating the two double features as a string of twelves rebuses, we can just break them into two separate down answers, expanding our puzzle from 15x15 to 17x15. This works because they are the only answers in columns 4 and 12. Here's the original grid vs the expanded version:

I have no idea if he actually took this approach (he's a much stronger constructor than I am, so maybe not). And it certainly wouldn't make the construction any less impressive - just finding two pairs of equal length films by the same actor that can be successfully placed side by side is pretty remarkable. The main point though is that using an expanded grid allows you to play around with different film pairs and grid arrangements with relative ease.

My next example is one of my own puzzles titled "Wet Hot American Puzzle." It's far from my best work, but I think it's a good use case for grid manipulation. I'm including it here if you want to try solving, or feel free to scroll right past it.

 

Welcome back!

So I was trying to write a HELL OR HIGH WATER themed puzzle where I wanted all the upper down words to be things that could be preceded by WATER and the lower downs to be followed by FIRE. It was pretty rough to construct, but this is what I ended up with:

Even with the abundance of gluey short fill, this was still a real pain to stitch together. Here's the actual grid I used when constructing:

I wouldn't have been able to finish the grid period without using this custom grid to first fill in the required FIRE/WATER squares.

Another use case is my Puzzle with a Twist from elsewhere on this blog. Feel free to solve it before reading on if you're so inclined, or just keep scrolling.

For this "Left Loosey / Righty Tighty" theme I wanted a column of stretched squares on the left and a column of rebuses on the right. Because both are occupying entire columns, we can use grid manipulation rather than wordlist manipulation. 

After much tinkering, here was the blank grid I used to fill (vs the final blank grid):

    

And here it is with the seeded theme entries:

   

Note that I needed to up my 2-letter word game in my wordlist before filling

This modified layout made it much easier to swap/rearrange the rebus answers until finding a viable grid. 

Here are the final filled versions as well:

   

   

I hope you've found this helpful, and I'll try to keep adding examples as I find them. Thanks!