The Complete 12 Rounds – The New York Times

SUNDAY PUZZLE — Will Shortz, in his printed introduction to this puzzle, writes: “Adam Wagner, of Oakland, California, is a creative manager at Patreon, a monetization platform for content creators. He is the creator of the online games Shuffalo and Catalogs on the New Yorker website. Adam says it’s the “kismet of crosswords” that the six sample themes in this puzzle worked perfectly in terms of length, interweaving and symmetry. Sometimes crosswords are just crosswords meant to be.

Talk about a lot of moving parts! This puzzle was difficult for me to understand, but once everything fell into place, it’s a beautifully elegant system.

Theme of the day

Solvers will notice six rectangular arrangements of gray boxes in this grid. They are both two squares high and six squares wide, and each has a black outline with rounded corners and four arrows that indicate clockwise or counterclockwise movement. Each rectangle also has a thick vertical line separating two squares in its top or bottom row. There are also two extremely useful revealing entries, at 49 and 85 inches, the first of which highlights a high-end feature of these shapes that I didn’t recognize on my own.

The way the clues work in this themed set is confusing before you master the trick. There are six clues that stand out because they make no sense at first glance, and they also run through six of the 12 lines that make up the gray rectangles. These appear at levels 19, 28, 66, 73, 112 and 124 – all gray lines with these thick lines, which turns out to be relevant – and all are a jumble of words and punctuation. 19A, for example, is (…in world trade)(Conflict…).

The rectangles contain six additional lines, above or below those already mentioned. Two of these are stand-alone entries with their own indices: 22A (Potential Profit), which extends below 19A and forms the topmost rectangle, and 121A (Some Factory Machinery), which is associated with 124A at the bottom of the grid. The other four are sequences of six letters in longer entries; you will see them in 32, 68, 70 and 103-Across.

The shape at 19 and 22 in diameter is a good gateway to untangling this confusing mechanism. This is where I cracked the code (that is, I used the brute force of the letters from the cross-entries to fill each square). 1-Down, (Bewilder), is a hilarious clue for this part of the puzzle: it solves in STUMP, which means T is the first letter of 19A and U is the first letter of 22A. With the added help of 2-6-Down, which are reasonably easy to deduce for Sunday solvers, I had every letter in every entry. 19A is TETRAD and 22A is UPSIDE, which goes with the index (potential advantage).