Though I briefly considered theming the Ubercross Abecedaria P around puns—I mean, what could be a more crosswordy theme than that?—I had already done at least two comedy-themed grids, and even those were more specific than a pun-themed grid would be. There’s word-twisty humor to be found in lots of crossword themes, but making such humor the theme itself just felt a little too on the nose. It’s like telling an improv comedian to “just be funny for twenty minutes”…without something more specific to work with, a lot of them will freeze up.
Besides, I really wanted to do palindromes.
You know, those symmetrical words and phrases like racecar and drawn inward.
Most innovations in crosswords focus on making things harder for the solver, at least until the theme is guessed (and sometimes guessing the theme is part of a contest metapuzzle). I wanted to experiment with themes that would make solving easier instead, stuff the solver could guess almost immediately and then use to great advantage. Since Ubercrosses are so big anyway, I wouldn’t have to worry about any power solvers feeling cheated or underwhelmed.
Tinkering with this kind of thing is good for the puzzle form in the long run. Devoted puzzleheads love the hard stuff, but casuals prefer things to be fairly easy…and an art form that serves its fans too much at the expense of beginners is an art form that’s flirting with long-term irrelevance.
So with the palindrome theme, solvers are invited to realize that any starred clue reads the same backwards and forwards, so if they fill in one letter they can probably fill in another (if it’s got a P in the second square, it’s got a P in the second-to-last square too).
Palindromes are tricky to compose on the spot. Most of the ones I used in P are either old favorites, new favorites I found somewhere online, or slightly modified from those to fit the needs of the grid. Still, there was a lot of palindromic greatness I had to leave out for one reason or other, and I’ll share some highlights of that in the coming week.