Spoiler Saturday: Marching Bands and Circular/Bull's-eye Crosswords

Driving puzzlers around the bends.

When I discussed the Ubercross O a while back, there was a couple of circular-type crosswords that I didn’t mention. One is arranged like a bull’s-eye and was developed by frequent TJoW contributor Darryl Francis. Answers move in two directions, counterclockwise around the concentric circles and in from the outside.

There’s more explanation in the passage below, found in Dmitri Borgman’s Curious Crosswords from 1970…

Though they’re described as circular crosswords in their intro, I prefer the term bull’s-eye crosswords to better distinguish them from the spiral and loop kinds. I solved some of these in Games Magazine long ago, but hadn’t run into any lately. So I could perhaps excuse myself from forgetting the type.

However, I have no such excuse when it comes to marching bands crosswords, a type that I’ve run into multiple times just in the last year!

Like the other circular types I’ve mentioned, it involves words moving in two directions. Unlike the spiral and loop, but like the bull’s-eye, only one of those directions is circular. One set of words is read straight across, the other is clockwise from the top left. Here’s a simple example from PuzzleNation:

The across answers are DISH, ONO, SCAM, ERR, ESS, PEAS, IAN, AMO, PLUG, RAM, LAP, MINE, AGE, and LENO. The outer band is DISHONOR, SOMEONE, LEGAL, and PIES; the middle band is CAMERAMAN and IMPALAS; and the innermost band is SPEAR GUN.

Here’s another example, this one by Mike Selinker, who reports he finds the form therapeutic:

Acrosses are STARCH, ART SHOW, WHATNOT, ESPANA, EXTRA SHOT, HEAR, TORQUE, ENDORSE, STROKE, SHAMWOW, HOJOS, PRESS ONE, SMUDGE, SUMMIT, INFERNO, TEXACO, REEVE, BE DAMNED, ISRAELIS, SIDE A, ELI WALLACH, ALY, REINED IN, STOPS, DRIED FIG, and TROOP.

Bands go STAR CHARTS, HOW ARE WE TODAY?, SPOOR, TGIF, DEIRDRE, and IRISH STEW; HAT NOTES, PANASONIC, EEL POT, SNIDE, NIELSEN, and MOTO X; TRASH, OTHER WOMAN, DAH, CALLA, WIRE-FU, and JRR; QUEENDOMS, MX MISSLE, AVE, and DOO; KESHA, SUE, ADE, and BERGS; and PRESTONE.

Doing marching bands right requires a lot of lateral thinking. They’re more multi-directional than spirals or loops. With those, you only have to worry about two directions—clockwise and counterclockwise—and how they interact with each other. Here, the bands are sometimes moving in the same direction as the across answers, sometimes crossing them perpendicularly like down answers, and sometimes moving in the opposite direction from them. So sometimes they act like snake charmers, sometimes like crosswords, and sometimes like spirals or loops.

And to my knowledge, no software exists to design marching bands puzzles. You can look up options for a half-filled answer like ??SHA with a crossword-making program or a website like OneLook. But beyond that, you’re on your own!

This puzzle genre’s never quite broken into the mainstream, but it pops up in my feed more often than the others, in tournament giveaways and in the work of Brendan Emmett Quigley and The New York Times. Maybe I’ll try to build a collection of them someday—oversized, naturally.