Hello, Quipsters!
I’m back with something from the vault for you! This is a quiptic from back in 2021, which was dredged up briefly as a freebie for the St. Louis Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 2023. I figured it was doing nobody any good sitting on the hard drive so here it is. I tweaked a couple bits to avoid wordplay too similar to that in other puzzles, but aside from that it’s warts-and-all. Watch out for the letter selection indicator in one clue that makes it a 1.5 device moment. Thanks to Will Eisenberg for the test in the distant past and to Shannon Rapp for making a bunch of innocent Midwesterners solve it last year.
The format is a bit different this time — I’m just putting up the online puzzle. It’s easily printable in the interface. You can go to “get a hint” in the “Reveal” menu to see the helpers on demand if you like (this spoils only the type of device being used in the clue). The parses for the answers will pop up upon solving or revealing.
This is the last quiptic I’ve got, aside from the giant pack of fresh ones that I’ll be dumping here in the next couple of weeks. Since people come solve my old ones a lot, and I am a work in progress, I’d rather folks see what I can do now rather than what I used to be able to do. Keep your eyes peeled!
Yours in cryptics,
Steve
Square Pursuit 