One of the challenges of coming up with new puzzle ideas is that it’s harder to make things easier.
A lot of creativity is about being clever and showing the world how clever you are. But put too much in that direction and you end up with a puzzle so “clever” that nobody can solve it. That’s a kind of “smart” that loops back around to being dumb.
Making an Ubercross-sized puzzle is close enough to that zone already, so I did my best not to get overclever with the clues. In the cryptic section, that meant leaning on the established types way more than the invented ones. One reason I emphasized double definitions and hidden clues so much is that they seemed like the easiest to parse.
And with a small number of clues, I tried repetition. Repetition is not a clue type of its own, just a modifier that you can apply to the other clue types.
I said that every clue type has a straight part and a cryptic part. Both of those parts can be considered paths to the answer. “Fortuneteller’s got music” is a nice simple clue for TUNE. If you’ve got T U _ _ filled in, you might think, Hey, there’s a TU__ word that’s a synonym for “music.” Or you might go, Fortuneteller’s a big word, and it’s got a “T-U” in it…could that be hiding something?
But what if you had more than two paths to the answer?
Fortuneteller’s impromptu network broadcast unencumbered by music
motif
(4)—TUNE
This is just your standard hidden clue, except that as the indicators hint, the hidden string is hidden multiple times (making it a “motif”).
Repetition works best with hidden clues, though it can sometimes pair with code clues…
Pompous, velvety Mormons
have the same orders
for breakfast (7)—SAUSAGE
Or charades…
It’s the truth established after Darling sharpens travelogue’s opening (6)—HONEST (EST. after HON, then HONES + T)
Or anagrams…
Begin being
third
indulgence (5)—BINGE
That last one sneaks back around to being a bit tricky, maybe. BINGE is the “third” of a set of three anagrams, with “begin” and “being” the other two. A “doubly mixed-up” indulgence would be less elegant, but maybe fairer.
Some schools of thought on cryptic writing reject this sort of thing. They tend to assert that the cryptic clue should be “tight” and that including multiple hints can actually be more misleading.
But I think some of that just sounds right because we’re not used to them. And we’re used to solving puzzles on a phone screen or in a newspaper, where space is at a premium and every letter counts. It can be rewarding to provide many paths to success in puzzles, just as there should be many paths to success in life.