SINGAPORE – On behalf of the ST×NLB Crossword team, thank you for playing our very first original puzzle. (If you haven’t, this story contains spoilers. Give the puzzle a go before reading on.)

We hope you enjoyed spotting the local references in this week’s puzzle and that you’ll be back every Sunday for more. Each puzzle will be accompanied by a companion column, Cross-References, giving a breakdown of the clues and answers, crossword-solving tips and book recommendations from our partners at the National Library Board (NLB).

As a little Easter egg to mark the launch of this collaboration, NLB librarian Sasha Tan and I co-constructed this puzzle and included the names of both our organisations in the answers. Did you grin or groan when you saw STRAITS TIMES (8A and 9A) and NATIONAL LIBRARY BOARD (19A, 25A and 27A) emerge on the grid?

We intended many of our clues to be accessible to players new to crosswords and reward local knowledge. Things specific to Singapore like NRIC (10D) and colloquial terms like CHIONG (14A) and ATAS (7D) make for answers that should be easy for a local to get.

Other clues were designed to offer a bit of a challenge for existing crossword enthusiasts.

Here are some comments on our favourite bits of this week’s puzzle. The full answer key is at the bottom of this story.

11A. [Box-bound entertainer] stumped some of our play testers, since it isn’t common to see a MIME in Singapore and the two letter Ms don’t cross other answers. But we felt the image of a mime pretending to be trapped in an invisible box was popular enough that it still made for a fair clue.

12A. [Fishy filling for epok-epok] refers to SARDINES, which we originally clued as “Might appear in curry puffs”. But