Listener No 4863, “Board of Trade”, A Setter’s Blog by Deuce

I’ve seen plenty of crossword puzzles based on games: Scrabble (from Paddock, just a few weeks ago); Boggle (from Twin); Battleships (Harribobs); Sudoku (Twin again); and uncountable further references to chess, bridge and go. 

Naturally, I wondered whether there might be others susceptible to a crossword treatment. 

I suspect your average Listener solver is rather less a fan of Monopoly than of any of the above games: less a challenging intellectual exercise, more something one is forced into at Christmas, or in this case Easter, or on any other occasion when one would frankly rather be curled up in the corner with the crossword.

Nonetheless I thought it could work as a theme: fun, recognisable to ordinary people (assuming, of course, that Listener solvers can be described as ordinary people,; and played on a board that is not merely square, but (if you count the outsize corner squares double) measures 13×13. Bingo. 

I wanted the puzzle to do two things: first, make people draw an unmistakable reconstruction of the board; and then require them to play the game, within the game’s own rules. 

This required a bit of scheming. I guess most Listener solvers would be most familiar with the London version that takes one from Old Kent Road to Mayfair. But that’s neither the only version, nor the original, which is based in Atlantic City. I didn’t want to tie the puzzle to any particular version. 

Instead of property titles, then, I had to indicate the board using colours; the requirement to colour only checked squares meant I had to design an asymmetric grid, a rare deviation which I felt to be thematically justified.

The use of strings of letters that jumble to indicate the colours, while formally speaking perhaps one of the more innovative features of the puzzle, was quite prosaic in origin. Quite simply ,I couldn’t think of any other way of indicating a set of eight distinct colours without giving the game away; stuffing RED and ORANGE unjumbled into clues would have been too obvious. Necessity is the mother of invention. 

(While I hope people indulged their artistic yen by colouring in the grid, I also felt it was unfair to require solvers to have quite so many coloured pencils, including two different shades of blue, so this was not a formal requirement for correct entries.)

I also had to cram at least two pieces on the board, and HAT and CAR proved the easiest to fit (though I was rather disappointed it wasn’t possible to include the cute Scottie DOG). I also added references in corner squares: GO, PARK(ing), JAIL twice; plus the word MONOPOLY emblazoned across the centre, as it is in a real board, just to add a final route by which people could get to the theme. I did have a try at squeezing in HASBRO, CHANCE and COMMUNITY CHEST, but this proved a little overwhelming for the already charged grid.

I also wanted a final step that required solvers to show some detailed knowledge of Monopoly rules: in this case, the rather peculiar rule about the rent due when landing on a utility, be it the ELECTRIC COMPANY or WATER WORK: either zero, four or ten times the value of the dice roll, depending on who owns each.

It was once I got to this stage that I thought to check the excellent xwdb.info and discovered with a heavy heart that, because of course, the Monopoly theme had actually been dealt with many times before, most recently in a 2018 EV by Stick Insect. Still, none of them had quite the same angle; and probably it’s for the best that I didn’t check until I was this far down the track, to avoid being unduly influenced by those who’d gone before. 

Some of the feedback I received suggests there were many ways solvers “penny-dropped” their way to the theme: via the colour scheme, via the word MONOPOLY, or, for some particularly switched-on solvers, via the title. However you got there, I hope it gave a little diversion from Easter egg hunts over a long weekend, and if, perhaps, the puzzle encouraged any of you to dig out that dusty red Hasbro box from some long forgotten attic, then I can only apologise to your immediate family. 

Deuce.