This is the crossword puzzle thread

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

er, did the Sunday NYT puzzle goatse us?

That has been suggested but I think it's about as intentional as the alleged swastika from a few weeks ago. There are limits on the permutations of a grid that is literally black and white. Inside those constraints - constraints imposed by design - there will occasionally be stuff like that. We've got more than a century in which dozens of crosswords get created per day. There are bound to be such correspondences.

Famously, a 1944 British crossword included several top-secret codewords related to the Normandy invasion - after exhaustive investigation, everyone concluded it had been a bizarre coincidence.

but, the centre four answers, the daylight at top left and bottom right, the pattern of the dark squares … I could write it off as pareidolia apart from the shaded squares at the centre. That’s not chance.

this is belated, but I thought the Friday NYT was really good - entertaining clues and fill

xp what would the corners have to do with it? Everything else is on purpose - the clue being signified is "making ends meet"

Corners missing makes the puzzle a different shape to square, anyway it’s pretty juvenile of me to insist on it and I will let it die

"Making ends meet" would surely be the opposite of the proposed effect, no?

Good long interview with Will Shortz, in which he talks crosswords and table tennis ... and comes out. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/will-shortzs-life-in-crosswords

That really is lovely

Nice!

Are you still constructing, jaymc?

Y'all know me, the stan for KAC. (For the record, I really enjoyed today's.)

Thursday and Friday were both unusually challenging, the former because i was slow to pick up the theme, and the latter because the NW felt so slippery and vague. I agree with Rex that giving JKR some shine was also pretty disagreeable.

Today’s was great - steady work, everything had to be earned but nothing felt contrived or wilful. I also liked the Thursday for once!
I’m glad Rowling’s public shame has grown to the point where she can’t brush it off and also I don’t have to look at those twee asinine clues.

Weird puzzle today.

Yeah it was unsettling. The first couple times I saw that it was breaking one of the longstanding rules of cluing*, I was like, "um, okay, maybe that's the theme" but they usually reserve such tricksiness to Thursdays. But I guess April 1 is a special case.

As I work backward through the archive (currently working through 2007), I see that historically, rebuses and other gimmicks (like backward answers) sometimes happened on Friday or Saturday. Shrug. I was able to finish and that's all that I care about.

* Generally there is an unwritten rule that no part of the clue can contain any part of the answer. Today's puzzle broke that rule repeatedly. Weird but I'll cautiously allow it in the spirit of raucous experimentation.

i kinda liked it, although it became obvious today. hiding in plain sight isn’t necessarily a bad thing

Hah, I overlooked today's date till YMP's post.

Yeah it's not subtle, as it is also the middle revealer theme answer

Tournament is on today.

Saturday PM session livestream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCU1ZOfWVPw

Hmm

Puzzle five is starting

Paolo Pasco woke up this morning with a slight lead over Dan Feyer.

Friend I met through jaymc told me he is officiating this year and I see him now in the stream. He is very tall and so hard to miss.

Think he was helping set up the boards for the B final, which is about to start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eodUcmhSvc

It's a triptych!

Different guy.

Maybe not.

It's just about on!

Amazing finish!