WHITEOUT!

This story begins in a Maui convenience store way back in February 2009. As I was meandering through the aisles, I came upon a clearly misplaced issue of Games on the store’s lonely rack of periodicals. As a former avid reader of the publication, I was overjoyed to be reunited with a lost friend and bought the issue on what was the very first day of an annual trip to Hawaii.

Upon digging into the magazine that evening, I saw that the classic puzzle types like crosswords and word searches were all there, as expected. However, it was the new puzzle formats I had never seen before that really caught my eye. When I got to the pair of Helter-Skelter puzzles constructed by Frank Longo (like the ones on page 31), I did an immediate double take. Upon looking at how the provided answer to the first clue was entered diagonally in red in the 8×8 grid—and without reading the directions—I (erroneously) assumed I was looking at a crossword-type puzzle with no shaded squares. I (incorrectly) surmised that the solver had to determine in which direction each answer needed to be placed in the grid so that