The idea for Playtime came to me one day whilst reading postings about a Listener on Derek Harrison’s Crossword Centre message board. I’d read many times about how a solver had enjoyed the ‘Penny Drop Moment’, or PDM, when solving a puzzle, so I thought to myself – why not give solvers precisely that? A puzzle whereby the penny quite literally drops. This was sometime in January 2008. The only problem was that my second Listener, The Cause of Much Pain, was about to see the light of day, and this too involved things dropping. Was it too soon to think about a puzzle where pennies drop? I thought not, and started to think about how such a puzzle would work.
The obvious thing to do was to somehow have a puzzle whereby a letter ‘P’ somehow started at the top of the grid, and ended up at the bottom, completing a phrase. It was then that I remembered the game of Downfall, which looks something like this:
Downfall was a game for two contestants, whereby each looked at one side of the vertical board, dropped counters into the top, and had to get theirs to the bottom before their opponents, the clever bit being that turning the rotors on your side of the ‘board’ also turned the rotors on the other side, potentially helping your opponent.
I quite like that idea, but wondered how this could be translated into a working grid. I went and read the Listener Notes for Setters, which warns against having weird and wonderful grids, as the chances of such puzzles being accepted was reduced because of the extra work involved in preparing them. Before I went much further with it, I thought that I should perhaps put together a format for a grid, and ask the Listener editors if they thought it might be acceptable.
Unfortunately my design skills are not up to much, so I struggled to come up with a decent way of preparing a vague outline. I knew that it would have to contain turning wheels, as well as cells, so used Word to put something together by drawing lines. The first stab looked something like this:
So the idea was already in place to put letters in the slots in the top row, rotate the slots, and then have the letters fall to the bottom. I sent a brief e-mail to Derek Arthur asking about the grid layout, and was told that it should be okay. I then started thinking more about how the puzzle would work.
The phrase ‘Penny Drop’ led me to think about a puzzle whereby the letter ‘P’ was thematically missing from the puzzle’s title. The first title that the puzzle had was Rinter’s Devilry, where all clues were Printer’s Devilry in format. At this point I saw the Penny Drop Moment as being at the end of solving the Listener Crossword, so I wondered if I could reveal a series of messages in my ‘penny drop’ when the wheels turned, being the stages involved in solving the Listener Crossword – read preamble, solve clues, locate thematic message, carry out denouement – and then the penny drops!! Accordingly, the puzzle’s name changed to “How to Solve the Listener Crossword”, and the preamble looked like this:
Clues are Printer’s Devilry, consisting of a sentence from which a word has been omitted… (ie standard Printer’s Devilry paragraph).
On completion of the grid, solvers will find that there are clashes in x cells. These cells should be left blank. In clue order, the clashing letters from across clues followed by clashing letters from down clues give an instruction to solvers.
On successful completion of the instruction, solvers should highlight a two word phrase (5,4) that describes both what has taken place in the grid (twice) and what solvers have experienced during the puzzle’s denouement.. Four other phrases must be highlighted in the grid. When read in order, the five phrases could be read as a guide to how to solve the Listener Crossword. Solvers should use pencil initially, and are not required to add, amend or move bars or grid lines.
The last sentence was one that I saw as important, and was to give me many headaches during the puzzle’s life. The grid would need to have bars in at some point, so how could I stop solvers trying to redraw the grid with moved bars, upside down rotors, etc, for submission? That way lay madness, and it would be necessary to somehow spell out that, despite any movements, the solution should be submitted in the grid that was printed, with no changes.
Over the course of the next few days, I realised that I wasn’t happy with the ‘how to solve the Listener Crossword’ theme. I had only had two Listeners published, and had what could be considered at best to be an average solving record, so felt in no way placed to deliver a guide to solving the puzzle. I thought again, and wondered if I could use other phrases that mean ‘the penny drops’. It didn’t take long for me to think of the most famous ‘penny dropping’ phrase of all – Eureka! I saw straightaway a possible link with Archimedes’ supposed last words – “Don’t mess with my circles”, but to my disappointment that quotation wasn’t in ODQ so couldn’t really be used. I also toyed with bringing the Archimedean Screw into the puzzle, but decided that it would be quite satisfactory if the rotations revealed Eureka, I’ve Got It, Archimedes, and THE PENNY DROPS.
The next problem was to sort out the symmetry of the puzzle. I wanted to have ‘pennies’ falling from the top to the bottom of the grid by means of the rotations, but the phrase ‘the penny drops’ wasn’t very helpful when it came to symmetry. I considered two options:
- A 15 by 12 grid, where the only turning rotors with slots in were in columns 4-6 and 9-12, so the finished grid would look like this at the bottom:
or
- A 12 by 12 grid, where the word ‘THE’ was omitted:
Neither had great symmetry, but I decided that the latter would look better with a complete grid. I got to work with Word and Sympathy, and within a week or so I had the following:
Rinter’s Devilry by Samuel
Across clues are Printer’s Devilry. Down clues are normal, but contain a superfluous word that must be removed before solving. In clue order, the first and last letters of these words give an instruction which solvers must follow. Letters must always be written so that they fall entirely within the cog passing through their cell.
Solvers must in turn rotate each of the sixteen cogs in the grid through 180 degrees, beginning with the top row and finishing with the bottom. The law of gravity must always be obeyed. Once all rotations have been made, solvers must highlight a phrase (a total of 10 letters) that both explains what has (twice) taken place and, with the addition of the definite article, what happens to solvers on discovery of the theme. A name and two versions of a quotation that are related to the theme must also be highlighted. Solvers should enter all letters upright, and should not amend or move any lines in the completed grid.
Solution Notes:
First and last letters of affected words (each of which contain the letter P) gave ADD TITLE’S MISSING LETTER INTO BLANK CELLS IN TOP ROW. Accordingly, the letter P (the correct title for the puzzle being Printer’s Devilry) was entered into the two blank cells in the top row. On rotation of the 16 cogs in the grid, the two Ps dropped to the bottom of the grid, obeying gravity at each rotation to drop into the empty slot at the top of the wheel below. On completion of the rotations, the phrase (the) PENNY DROPS appears in the bottom row, describing both the fall of the two Ps from the top of the grid to the bottom, and what is experienced by solvers on completing the rotations (THE PENNY DROPS is defined in Chambers as ‘now I understand’). In line with the theme of ‘understanding’, ARCHIMEDES, EUREKA and I HAVE IT were also to be highlighted.
However, I felt that this spoonfed the solution too easily to solvers, and gave rather too much away in the preamble. It already seemed possible that the theme might be guessed from the grid. But how to effectively miss out the second paragraph of the preamble? I would need a much longer message, hopefully one whereby each clue would generate two letters towards it. I hit upon the idea of having to remove two consecutive letters from each clue before solving (and how I would regret that!), so then came up with the preamble that ended up being published. I decided, after much work, to sacrifice symmetry in order to get a fill, and I was at last in a position to start writing clues.
The problem was, however, that it was nightmarishly difficult to write clues whereby two consecutive letters had to be removed. I ploughed on, though, and, lots of hard work and several months later, the puzzle was, I thought, complete, with all clues written. The grid looked like this:
There was one quite serious problem, though. I reckoned that I had spent well over 100 hours on the puzzle so far, but I just wasn’t happy. The main reason was the fill. I had struggled to get one in the first place, but this just had too many plural entries – MUMS, BREATHS, SETS, ESTEEMS, RACERS, SNYES, SATIRES. It had bothered me whilst writing the clues, but now I just thought that it wouldn’t do. I spent a couple of weeks agonising over it, and when I finally decided to scrap the fill, I was very relieved. However, I then had a further idea. Could I turn the puzzle into an “Eightsome Reels’ idea? I spent a few days on this, and really struggled to get a fill with the limitations of having to have the letters for the four thematic phrases in the correct position in the original fill:
So I abandoned this and, with some work on the original fill, I managed to get the number of plurals down, and started to write clues for a second time.
Finally, a couple more months later, the puzzle was complete, and I sent it to two of my regular test solvers. Both liked it (one had seen the empty grid before, and had ever since referred to it as “The Pacman Puzzle”, as his guess of the theme), and it was off to the Listener editors. Pleasingly, there were very few clues to amend/rewrite, and the puzzle was accepted for publication. I owe both editors, especially Derek Arthur, a vote of thanks for being patient with several queries that I raised with them during the puzzle’s gestation.
