The Ubercross Diagramless?
Don't worry, it was just a bad dream.
There’s one other kind of D-crossword I could’ve tried to work with: the diagramless crossword. Had I gone that route, you would’ve gotten the same clue files as in a “normal” Ubercross, but the grid would’ve looked like this:
The black squares and numbers would be left for you to fill in. I rejected this idea because:
Thinking it over, I decided I didn’t hate all humanity and want to increase the world’s suffering, after all. Lord God, these things are hard enough already.
The most rewarding aspect of a diagramless would be spoiled for you, anyway.
Diagramless crosswords date back to the 1920s and gained more traction after the 1980s: they’re now available from sources including the NYT, Dell, and many indie publishers like Brendan Emmett Quigley. Some of the finished grids they offer look like pretty typical crossword fare. like this one from the NYT.
Others have a wild, abstract-expressionist beauty. This one’s a sample from Diagnil, a diagramless-solving program.
But my favorites are representational. This one’s a Quigley construction—see if you can find the six symmetrical entries that relate to its shape.
Answers: GREEN MAN and STAR TREK crossing SPACE INVADERS, and MY FAVORITE MARTIAN above UFO and ETS. It’s too bad this grid came out some years before the alien-invasion movie NOPE.
As you can probably tell, I love grid art. A good diagramless lets you discover such art on your own, like a game of connect-the-dots crossed with crosswords. But that’s only fun when you don’t know what shape the grid is going to take. And now that I’ve published three of these…
I’m pretty sure you know what the fourth one is gonna look like.
