There are 64 jigsaw-like pieces that can be rearranged on the puzzle page and the first step is to construct the jigsaw. Each piece contains a crossword clue in its center and halves of crossword clues on its edges. The crossword clue halves can be combined to make a single coherent crossword clue and this lets us construct the jigsaw. Some crossword clues are easier to piece together when there are proper nouns as in "Like Julius... ...Caesar's assassin?" or are when they are semantically related as in "Species related to alligators... ...and crocodiles". The more vague crossword clues can be pieced together as options are eliminated.

Once the full 8x8 jigsaw is constructed, the extract letters spell out READ UNCHECKED LETTERS AND HIDDEN LETTERS around the border of the grid. The next step is to start solving crossword clues and determine how to fill them into the grid. After solving a number of clues, we might notice that all the center clues have 9 letter answers and all the edge clues have 7 letter answers. The flavortext"The niyrtveon is all jumbled and the ven-d-ors all split up!" clues that the 9 letter answers are our "inventory" and the 7 letter answers are our "vendors". We can fill in the 9 letter answers in some scrambled order in each 3x3 block such that the 7 letter word spans two 3x3 blocks, with a hidden letter in between. The vendor words always split evenly with the first 3 letters in the top/left block and the last 3 letters in the bottom/right block. For example, the first two 3x3 blocks are filled in as below:

The left 3x3 block is filled with the word CHERISHED and the right 3x3 block is filled with the word ARABESQUE. The word ICECUBE spans the two blocks horizontally. We can continue to solve crossword clues and fill in the grid, using some logic to deduce how the letters are filled within each 3x3 block. The filled grid is below:

Now, if we read the unchecked letters and hidden letters as instructed by the earlier cluephrase, we find a new list of words. Unchecked letters are letters that only belong to a single word, and are thus the centers of the 3x3 squares. Note that some letters on the border of the 8x8 can be in one of two squares, but are still used in two words and hence are considered checked. The unchecked letters give us:

HANDSOME
CHARCOAL
REFRACTS
DESTINED
MINDLESS
SERGEANT
OBSTACLE
RICEBALL

The hidden letters are the centers of each 7 letter word and reading horizontally then vertically we obtain the words:

CUBE
ACCOLADES
ARBITRAGE
BOTANICAL
CHLORIDES
COASTLINE
CRAFTSMEN
DESIGNATE
INTEGRATE
MODERNISM
ORCHESTRA
STEADFAST
STEERABLE

We have eight 8 letter words, twelve 9 letter words, and the word "CUBE". This suggests that we should build a cube out of these words, with the 8 letter words corresponding to vertices and the 9 letter words corresponding to edges in some fashion, analogous to the two-dimensional 8x8 grid. In three dimensions, this would correspond to each 8 letter word filling a 2x2x2 cuboid and altogether they form a 4x4x4 cube. These 8 letter words are our new "inventory" words and the 9 letter words span two cuboids as our "vendor" words, with the middle letter hidden. Based on this, we are able to construct the 4x4x4 cube uniquely with some logical reasoning. This cube is visualized below:

Similar to the two-dimensional case, we can look at the unchecked letters, which correspond to the corners of the 4x4x4. These unchecked letters in the original order of the eight letter words spells out the answer HARDSELL.

Author's Notes

Herman: This puzzle idea came about because I had written a couple of crossword-like puzzles with a non-traditional way of filling in words and wanted to write another such puzzle. I randomly came up with the idea of nine-letter words going in a 3x3 and having the 3x's intersect along edges and we brainstormed the rest of the puzzle from there.

The actual construction of the puzzle was fairly constrained as there are quadruple-y checked letters in the three dimensional cube and letters are triple checked in the two dimensional grid. We spent quite a long time constructing the two-dimensional grid and backtracked many times to get higher quality fill; in the end I think we ended up with a fairly decent set of words given how constrained the construction was.

Adding a crossword clue matching component came about after a disastrous first testsolve and I'm pretty happy with how it improved the puzzle. Originally, the puzzle was presented just as a list of inventory clues and vendor clues and solvers had to use logic and letter counts to piece together the 8x8. Turning the puzzle into a jigsaw added a fun but not too difficult first step and also specified where all the words go, so that only some local logic is needed to determine where the letters go within each 3x3.

We reserved the answer HARDSELL pretty early on since we knew that we had to have an 8 letter answer and this was the only such non-entangled answer. We figured no one would mind anyways since it wasn't a particularly thematic answer. At some point, we needed to theme the puzzle to fit the carnival. Prior to that, we had just called the puzzle "Fill the Grid". I thought about what you could possibly find at a carnival that had lots of squares and came up with the idea of a bazaar where each square is a shop. We made the flavortext work with the theming and I was pretty happy with it. It wasn't until a while later that I realized we had made the answer thematic!

Joanna: With the change to use very large pre-existing tiles, we realized that the jigsaw step was not well suited for Google Sheets (my computer lagged out any time I tried to do tile swaps), so we started with the idea of turning it into an interactive puzzle to ease the initial steps. Since copy-to-clipboard is something available throughout the hunt, adding a UI to change the copy-to-clipboard seemed like it would improve the solver experience a considerable amount. While we didn't want shared state between teams all the time, Herman's idea to encode the state into the URL hopefully made sharing between teammates a quick step.