SATURDAY PUZZLE — This is Jesse Guzman’s third New York Times construction, after an inventive Thursday debut and a Friday grid from this April. I honestly found today’s puzzle challenging, and I wonder how many solvers will be on the right wavelength to surf these waters, which include niche trivia, laconic wordplay, and some truly eccentric clues for entries that, in many cases, are also unusual.

It’s immensely enjoyable, though. I didn’t fully appreciate the grid layout until I read Mr. Guzman’s notes, but the open center in a themeless puzzle really does allow for a lot of interesting crosses. It took me a while to build in enough letters to make guesses at some of those eccentric clues, but they all turn out to be quite elegant.

Tricky Clues

1A/16D. The first across entry and the most visually prominent down entry in this puzzle are related, and they are both out of my bailiwick. At 1A, the [Fire-breathing antagonist of Mario in the Mario universe] is BOWSER, which has been clued a variety of ways in the Times puzzle: as a dog’s name a few times; as the mayor of Washington, D.C.; and, in its 1956 debut, in a Eugene T. Maleska puzzle, as [Bing Crosby’s name for his toupee]. At 16D, the [Turtle-shelled flunky of 1-Across] is KOOPA TROOPA, which is a puzzle debut. (Funny enough, this is what Bing Crosby called his fleet of Continental Mark IIs. I jest, but you never know.)

25A. [Hungarian has 18 of them (yikes!)] is a reference to grammatical CASES, which appear as suffixes that modify a noun. Hungarian, or Magyar, has ancient Siberian roots and linguistic similarities to Finnish and Estonian.