This is the crossword puzzle thread

On a Thursday you expect there to be a gimmick. This had three different gimmicks. The one with circled letters forming an appropriate word? Very nice, very layered. A good three-tier visual joke.

The one where a letter gets skipped in a humorously appropriate way? Very good. I generally like that kind of play on Thursday.

The third gimmick - with the shaded letters - was comprehensible in retrospect. I'll allow it (in the spirit of expanding the playfulness possibilities of crosswords), but it was not as elegant as the other two gimmicks.

Overall, refreshing. If you want hard themeless puzzles with no rebus trickery or whatever, go to Friday/Saturday or seek out the Fireball equivalents. If you start a Thursday NYT you should just accept that there's probably gonna be some hyjinx.

I actually didn't understand the circled letters at all? I understand the shape, but not why that word is within them.

Hooked hand. FLUSH is a poker hand

Thank you!

First Sunday I’ve actually enjoyed in a while.

it’s just . . . recipe ingredients? wtaf

Yes just the ingredients alone would be a boring theme, but the revealer is a resplendent word, difficult for Americans to spell, and not a common crossword answer. I'll allow it. Difficulty-wise, it just scrapes into Thursday territory.

KAC with a tough but fair one today.

Yeah. 16A, 17A, 58A were completely new to me. Finished in decent, but it took work.

I got 1A quickly but don't think I've seen it in a puzzle before.

3D, 10D, 30D, 52D were a bit of a stretch though. Leee's "tough but fair" is accurate.

Generally fine for me but I am heartily sick of slangy-nickname-for clues, the southeast had some near unsolvable crosses I had to guess/triangulate.

3D and 52D were good imo (any method of avoiding elliott ness-type references is okay with me) but no doubt provincial

17A was weird but i guess i learned something? 60A should have been clued 'nickname of mookieproof's high school sports teams'

xxxxp if thursday were international v_________ day or something that would be *slightly* different but . . . while i generally dislike thursday gimmickry, i can respect certain ideas or attempts -- i mean, i didn't love *last* thursday's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks puzzle, but hey, it tried. nothing about yesterday's earned it a thursday slot imo

How do you feel about "here's a short anecdote in six long answers" efforts?

I liked 10D, absolutely as valid as another baseball question.

Today's OTOH... I really didn't like the SW.

oh, i don’t care for the anecdote-in-six-long-answers either, but i suppose that if it has something to do with the date the puzzle is run then fine

god themeless sundays are tedious

also i didn’t notice this as i was filling it out but now i can’t un-see it:

Can anyone explain why the Times crossword is a swastika on the first day of Hanukkah pic.twitter.com/z3cZ3nPVZ6

— Themperor Kennedy🐸🏳️‍🌈 (@kennedytcooper) December 18, 2022

meghan mccain is really mad about this too

Yes it is, like, one of the things that can happen when you attach significance to a grid of squares that requires rotational symmetry

No serious person really thinks it was intended as a swastika

It was amusing for like three seconds

Can we move on from this please because now it is really boring

thanxbye

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slU0PSJedbU

Clever theme today.

anyone else do the NYT PuzzleMania this year? just finished the behemoth crossword this morning (grid is 67x41!)

I hate to speak ill of a constructor who's both a kid and attending one of my alma maters, but there's a steaming turd of an answer in today's puzzle that I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out (and of course it turned out that my error was in another square).

There was one that I boggled at until I read it as two words, nothing else springs to mind..

(and one that I traditionally get annoyed at, and one that everyone traditionally gets annoyed at, but those are old battles)

I'm curious - 91 down?

92 down? 93 down? 6 across? 15 across?

6 across was a new one for me

but at least it was no YUVAL NOAH HARARI, about which i knew rex parker was going to lose his shit

93D. Maybe it's because I'm never ready any DFW?

I've never read

couldn't parse 92D at all

By the way that hated upthread word also appears in Twain

I bought a book of Saturday NYTimes puzzles, all Saturdays from 2010-2011. Even considering that some clues might be less topical, the puzzles play way harder for me than current Saturdays - it's usually a struggle to finish without Googling or peeking. I wonder if it was a public decision to make the hardest day easier, or if they just gradually changed the difficulty level.

Consensus seems to be that puzzles from that time period were just plain harder. My own experience bears this out (currently working through 2009). As for your question, I don't really think there was an intentional decision; there has just been a gradual trend toward more accessibility.

Oh! BTW, I wrote to NYT several years ago asking for them to take some glitchy times out of my stats. I've got a few absurdly low best times (like a 1:00 Wednesday) due to technical problems.

At the time, the only thing they could do was wipe out all my stats, which I didn't want to do.

But today I wrote to them again asking whether the situation had changed and they could simply reset the best time to the current average. They wrote back immediately and said yes.

In these days where almost nothing gets any better, it was a ray of sunshine.

i suspect making the puzzles easier was absolutely a conscious choice. the games are a big moneymaker for the nyt at awfully little cost. as ppl moved to doing them on apps, keeping track of best times and streaks was a way to get and keep them hooked. and if you can’t do saturdays, you lose your streak and have less incentive to keep playing forever

yeah that makes a lot of sense. it's a shame (as someone who isn't trying to keep up a streak). the quality of the fill these days is a lot stronger on average- more interesting long answers, less obscurities. I just wish they would make the cluing more difficult, and preserve Saturdays as a real challenge.

I'm curious if the exact date of this shift to easier puzzles could be pinpointed, but it's probably impossible.

fill clues should always be as hard as good taste allows imo

I like current NYT puzzles Thursday through Saturday.

I like current NYT puzzles Wednesday through Saturday.

I like Fireball puzzles.

I like New Yorker puzzles if they are labeled as challenging.

Basically, I think I just like American style crossword puzzles. And I want them to be difficult.

The only type of puzzles I've balked at are gridless or the ones where the words are made up.

I rarely do acrostics or Bri'ish puzzles as my head is just not in that gear.

I did a whole book of Fireball crosswords and I mostly didn't think they were hard enough, the only Hard Enough crosswords out there to me are Brooke Husic's experimental/challenging clues

Tricky Thursday, with a bit of a finicky gimmick to get the app to accept your solve, reveal only if you've figured out the theme: you have to enter the some of the letters as rebuses, to approximate a growing snowball.

I liked it! Tricky but not impossible.

Thought today was cute, although having to fill in any rebus on my device is kinda annoying

i'm about halfway through it but it was a bit of a pain in the ass getting the catch unwound

Saturday NYT was so good! I mean I found it quite hard but it was never dull and very satisfying as the bricks stacked up.

We did it when we went out for breakfast, which was a lot of fun, the first time that I did most of a crossword 'with' someone, Jen did as well as I did, tbf there were only a few (ANTED/ATE) where I had to say no, this is a NYT thing.

And then we stopped 80% of the way through because we should vacate the table, and when I got home I think I probably cleared up the rest in 2 minutes but that's how it goes.

We did it when we went out for breakfast, which was a lot of fun, the first time that I did most of a crossword 'with' someone, Jen did as well as I did, tbf there were only a few (ANTED/ATE) where I had to say no, this is a NYT thing.

And then we stopped 80% of the way through because we should vacate the table, and when I got home I think I probably cleared up the rest in 2 minutes but that's how it goes.

(sorry for double post)

My wife and I used to do the Sunday Washington Post Magazine puzzle together (when it was good). I am left-handed and she is right-handed, so we could work simultaneously in different colors of ink.

Our puzzling appetites have diverged but remember it being a nice ritual.

Okay that’s pretty damn cute

Yeah it is!

NYT cutting all their variety puzzles / acrostics from their website, and then also deleting their archives sure seems like an F U to puzzle fans. How hard is it to make a pdf? Is there any real difference in the online functionality of a cryptic and a regular crossword? All the stock answers that have been given seem to have made by somebody who doesn’t actually like puzzles.

ugh