#31: Hat Trick

 

[PDF] [PUZ]
difficulty: medium

Hey, it's been a while. Two whole months without a QVXword? Perish the thought. Well, I want to get some new puzzles up in advance of what I suspect will be a huge traffic bump off people spamming the link to this site in the Boswords chat sometime in the next month. Plus, I gotta do something special for the one-year anniversary of QVXwordz, right? More on that later.

Anyway, this is a rather gentle, lightly themed puzzle that plays a little more like a spooky seasonal themeless. The grid shape is inspired ever so slightly by Ross Trudeau, who frequently does puzzles with this sort of mirror grid setup - including very recently in a lovely collaborative puzzle done with me and the equally great Sally Hoelscher. (If you haven't solved that puzzle, called "The Space Between Us," do it! It's very fun.)

Anyway, applet under the cut. Will Eisenberg and Frisco gave very useful feedback that made this puzzle just a little fairer. Enjoy! And see you next week.