This is the third in my series of underappreciated Variety puzzle types, following posts on Acrostics and PandAs.
As its name implies, vowelless puzzles are like regular crosswords except you only write in the consonants. If this sounds ridiculous, I have a secret for you: Vowelless crosswords are not only fun, they tend to be the easiest of the Variety types. You need to shift your brain into a slightly different gear, but that doesn’t take long.
Vowelless clues include “enumerations”, that is, the lengths of each word in the full answer phrase including the missing vowels. That means, you can often solve many clues without any crosses. “Doomsayer’s warning” could be a lot of things, but adding “(3, 3, 2, 4)” means that if a possible answer you considered is THE END IS NEAR, it’s probably right, since it fits the counts.
Even long single words tend to be more straightforward. If “Humans to aliens (10)” conjures up the phrase “Greetings earthlings” you’re probably on the right track, since EARTHLINGS has 10 letters.
For trickier clues, the crosses help, of course. You’ll be surprised how quickly phrases come to you with just a few letters and those handy enumerations.
This weekend’s main Variety puzzle is a Vowelless by Evan Kalish. If you have a computer with a mouse and keyboard, and an XWord Info account, you can solve it here or print out the PDF. If you get stuck, you can view the solution here.
Seriously, give this puzzle a try. You’ll like it.