In other news, I was a co-constructor for Fireball Crossword’s annual April Fools’ Day Cuckoo Crossword, which features bizarre, completely made-up words and phrases all over the grid. But the most exciting news about that is that my co-constructor was my wife, Vicki! So she is now officially a published crossword constructor. It’s a subscription-only puzzle, but you can get a Fireball subscription here.
Music and games are two of life’s greatest activities, so I combined them into one puzzle. Five answers feature ships, songs associated with those ships in the clues, and some red-shaded squares. Recognize the ships? They’re from the classic board game Battleship, and each of them has sustained at least one hit (represented by the red squares).
- 21A: [The Reuben James of Woody Guthrie’s song “The Sinking of the Reuben James,” e.g. (HIT)] is DESTROYER, with a hit at the S.
- 28A: [Setting of the “Top Gun” opening, when “Top Gun Anthem” and “Danger Zone” can be heard (HIT HIT)] is AIRCRAFT CARRIER, with hits at the first A and I.
- 70D: [The USS Missouri, e.g., where the music video for Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” was filmed (HIT)] is BATTLESHIP, with a hit at the L.
- 76D: [Titular vessel of an old Australian TV series whose theme song has been performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (HIT)] is PATROL BOAT, with a hit at the first O.
- 101A: [Vessel in the lyrics to “In the Navy” (HIT)] is SUBMARINE, with a hit at the N.
The revealer for this game of musical Battleship is at 115A: [Naval-sounding band that performed a 1979 hit spelled out in this puzzle’s “hits”] which is THE COMMODORES. Take the letters in the red HIT squares and you spell SAIL ON, which you can listen to here. It was a hit for its time, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
But no Battleship puzzle would be complete without a few misses along the way. Three other theme answers are bodies of water where this puzzle’s Battleship player missed the targets, with each MISS shown by circled squares:
- 48A: [Waters bordering Iran (MISS)] is PERSIAN GULF, with a miss at the S.
- 62A: [Waters by a Pacific archipelago (MISS MISS MISS)] is PHILIPPINE SEA, three misses the first P, the L and the A.
- 91A: [Waters surrounding Antarctica (MISS MISS)] is SOUTHERN OCEAN, with misses at the S and H.
It’s not mentioned in a separate revealer, but since you saw that the HIT squares spelled out a hit song, just do the same thing with the MISS squares and you spell out SPLASH. There are song titles by that name, but it’s just an apt word that would describe what you’d hear if a Battleship missile missed a ship and landed in the water.
As a final bonus, I added a small bonus clue at 128A: [National ___ Hall of Fame (institution that could potentially induct the board game that inspired this puzzle)] which is TOY. I believe Battleship has been nominated for induction for several years in a row now, but it hasn’t made it in yet. Once it does, I’ll make sure to update that clue in case I rerun the puzzle in the newspaper or in a book.
Battleship may be a simple guessing game, but the journey of this crossword from initial idea to completed puzzle hit some rough waters along the way. It’s not uncommon for a theme to develop from something less complex while you plan it out, but this was a case where my original plan was especially flawed — and I followed that plan for way longer than I should have. I was going to use the same five ships and THE COMMODORES and the meta answer of SAIL ON, but I wanted to use multiple consecutive circled squares in the ship answers that would represent the holes in the game’s ship pieces. So imagine, say, three circled squares at the DES of DESTROYER since that ship can take up to three hits before it sinks, five circled squares at the AIRCR of AIRCRAFT CARRIER since that ship takes five hits to sink, and so on.
The clues were going to be much more bland, too, structured simply as “Piece No. 1,” “Piece No. 2,” etc., with both HIT and MISS indications in the clues. So if the first three letters of DESTROYER were circled, that clue would have been [Piece No. 1 (MISS MISS HIT)], since the D and E were misses and the S was a hit. The MISS squares weren’t going to lead to anything; all you’d have by the end was SAIL ON and a bunch of leftover, meaningless circled squares. I didn’t have a ton of theme material, so I threw in WATER and MUSIC elsewhere as a two-part revealer, too, clued in reference to both the overall theme of the puzzle and George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music” suites.
I think I made it through maybe 75 percent of that grid before I realized I had fundamentally misrepresented Battleship. The ship answers are the game pieces that you try to hit, so it made no sense that circled squares on their spaces could be both hits and misses. I suppose I could have written the clues such that the unused circled squares would be indicated with blank spaces, but that would mean leaving out MISS markers entirely, which is a basic part of the game that you can’t really ignore. That’s when I turned to my wife. She suggested the idea to add in bodies of water (or at least phrases hinting at them, such as OPEN WATERS and DEEP BLUE SEA), and then I could potentially spell something else with the MISS squares in the right places. This isn’t the first time that Vicki has come to the rescue with a suggestion that I never considered but that pulls the whole idea together; it won’t be the last time. She is a published crossword constructor herself, after all.
When all of that was settled, then I got the idea to connect the Battleship pieces with some actual musical pieces. You don’t need to know “The Sinking of the Reuben James” or the theme song to “Patrol Boat” to solve the puzzle, but I figured it tied the concepts of playing games and playing music together decently. My one regret is that it took a very, very long time to find music angles that I liked for all five ships. I don’t know how much time I sank into the internet trying to find a good song about or related to a PATROL BOAT. That one by itself probably took me an hour or two.
Next week I’ll report back about the ACPT. My hope is that Elliot had a good time meeting the extended crossword family for the first time.
