Since I'm posting recaps of my solving the New York Times crossword puzzles, I thought I'd give an overview of the how the puzzle works.
The puzzles are posted each day online at 10pm Eastern (7pm Pacific), the day before the puzzle dates. On Saturday and Sunday the puzzles are posted at 6pm for the Sunday and Monday puzzles.
The Monday through Saturday puzzles are usually 15x15 grids. They get progressively harder each day. I've found that Monday and Tuesday are about the same (and very easy), along with Wednesday and Thursday being equally difficult. The Thursday puzzle (and on occasion Wednesday and Sunday) will have some kind of trick to it. It might be a rebus puzzle for example. A rebus is two or more letters in the same square. Another example is using a black square to represent the word "black." I'm not really a fan of trick puzzles, and if I don't get the trick quickly, I bail on the puzzle.
The Friday and Saturday puzzles are generally the toughest of the week. Many times the Monday through Thursday puzzles will have themes. Basically, they have three or more answers that are common in some way. The Friday and Saturday puzzles rarely have themes (called "Themeless"). Solving veterans prefer there not being themes within those puzzles.
Sunday's puzzle is usually a 21x21 grid. It always has a theme, and a title of the puzzle is included to give a hint to the theme. As I understand it, the Sunday puzzle difficulty is about the same as a Wednesday.
I consider myself decent solver. I am by no means an expert. For example, I can solve the Monday puzzles between six and seven minutes on average. Sometimes I dip below six minutes, but not often. There are those out there who can solve it in two minutes. I kid you not. I solve on an iPad, so I don't know if my time would improve if I solved on paper.
My patience on solving runs about 50 minutes. If I haven't finished by then, I will usually give up and get the answers. Sometimes it takes just one cheat, and I can blast through the rest of the puzzle. I will be honest, and when I can't solve the puzzle I will put a big, fat DNF (Did Not Finish) next to the solving time.
If you're interested, there are two sites I frequent for comments on the daily puzzles. The first is xwordinfo. They have an in with the NYT, because they publish the answers along with the grid and a detailed breakdown of the puzzle as soon as the puzzle is posted online. They have a huge database of all the words used in the puzzles dating back decades. Worth a look.
The other site I frequent is Rex Parker Does the NYT Puzzle. He solves the puzzle, then posts it. If he solves it near posting, he posts his results and comments at midnight Eastern. If he solves it in the morning, well, it will be early but no set time. He can be very critical of the puzzles.
You need a subscription to access the puzzles. It's $6.95 a month or $39.95 annually.
I live on the fringe of the crossword puzzle world, so if anyone reads this and finds fault with something I've written, please, be sure to let me know so I can fix it.
No comments:
Post a Comment