The following describes the Ubercross Abecedaria in general terms without giving away specific answers. This was a hint I considered adding to the description of the puzzle itself, so I don’t feel like it gives away too much, and it may even help your enjoyment of the puzzle. It may also be of use to fellow crossword constructors. But if you want to avoid anything resembling a hint when solving the puzzle, then skip these “Spoiler Saturday” and “Spoiler Sunday” posts.
As soon as I decided on an alphabetic theme for this latest Ubercross, I started thinking about how to reflect that in the content of the puzzles, not just the grid design. I could select answers in the “A” section with an eye toward the ones that started with A…and I soon found a few entries I could clue as “What the A stands for, in animation,” “What the A stands for, in superhero comics,” et cetera.
But I knew constructing this puzzle would be mentally exhausting enough that I couldn’t rely just on my own concentration. I had to set up the software in a way that’d help me.
I brought back an old bit of Excel trickery I once used to assign “Scrabble values” to various strings, just to see what words or phrases in a certain list were the Scrabbliest, in terms of point value per letter. Crossword designers love using Scrabbly answers, which are harder to work with and therefore rarer and more refreshing to see.
(In superhero comics, J’ONN J’ONZZ and MR. MXYZPTLK are in top-20 territory with 4.55 and 3.9, but it’s hard to beat the old Hulk villain ZZZAX at 7.8.)
But what if those “Scrabble values” were changed? What if every letter was given just one point except your letter of choice…A for the A section and so on, which could be given 100 points?
Consider BANANARAMA, pictured above, a pop trio (later duo) with a record-setting number of charting songs. Bananarama didn’t make my original word list, so they aren’t to be found in Ubercross Abecedaria A…but they would be, if I were starting it again today. With my system, BANANARAMA comes to 1 + 100 + 1 + 100 + 1 + 100 + 1 + 100 + 1 + 100 = 505, with an enviable point average of 50.5.
I took my crossword word list, found the highest-scoring words with this method and put them in the grid, then put everything with a “Scrabble” score over 101 into a file of “preferred answers.” As I started filling the grid out, I put my “preferred answers” file into the software, so that words that had A’s anywhere in them would be given priority. And then I stumbled onto a surprise…but more on that tomorrow.