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I’ve been doing the NYT crossword regularly the past year or so. NYT crosswords often have tricks, either in the clues themselves or patterns in the puzzle. W

I’ve been doing the NYT crossword regularly the past year or so. NYT crosswords often have tricks, either in the clues themselves or patterns in the puzzle. Will Shortz commented on one of his favourite clues Q: “It may turn into another story” A: Spiral Staircase. There are others I’ve found sneaky, eg Q: Greek Leader. A: Alpha Today’s puzzle had for example Q: Whopper Junior A: Fib 2. Some puzzles have rebus answers, where more than one letter will fill a single square. It’s not obvious when this is the case 3. Sometimes there is an overall pattern to the puzzle. One recent example was a rebus where several squares had double O rebuses in single square. If you connected these squares together they formed the shape of a 7, ie 007. A few clues on the puzzle related to James Bond and would be meaningless without this context, eg the clue would mention a range of years and the answers were Sean Connery or Daniel Craig.

dnautics 5y ago
IIRC when I was doing NYT the super tricky rebuses (the one I remember was "bell" being the rebus and you could draw a bell in the square) are only allowed to be on one day of the week. Sunday, was it?
- markelliot 5y ago
  They’re most common on Thursdays but increasingly appear on Wednesdays, too. Sunday is typically the “big” puzzle day, and has a titled theme that usually provides a hint to at least some of the clues, or the puzzle aspect.
tzs 5y ago
> Some puzzles have rebus answers, where more than one letter will fill a single square. It’s not obvious when this is the case. Another deviation from the "one letter per square, all in a line" that they sometimes have is the bent answer. I recall one for instance where there were several isolated black squares, and some answers that ran into these continued after a 90 degree turn. So you might have 5 spaces to the left of the black square, but the answer was actually 9 letters with the last 4 written upward from the black square. As with rebuses, they don't tell you that a puzzle has this sort of thing. You are left to figure it out on your own. For that 90 degree turn example, you'd probably get it by filling in enough of the words that cross it to notice that the 5 space section matches the start of a 9 letter word that would work, and notice that the 4 letters that would complete that word are going up from the black square. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence, and then you'd go look at other places where the answers seemed to short and see that same trick works there. I don't think I've seen any the have both rebuses and non-linear answers. That would be a nightmare.

dnautics 5y ago

IIRC when I was doing NYT the super tricky rebuses (the one I remember was "bell" being the rebus and you could draw a bell in the square) are only allowed to be on one day of the week. Sunday, was it?

markelliot 5y ago
They’re most common on Thursdays but increasingly appear on Wednesdays, too. Sunday is typically the “big” puzzle day, and has a titled theme that usually provides a hint to at least some of the clues, or the puzzle aspect.

tzs 5y ago

> Some puzzles have rebus answers, where more than one letter will fill a single square. It’s not obvious when this is the case. Another deviation from the "one letter per square, all in a line" that they sometimes have is the bent answer. I recall one for instance where there were several isolated black squares, and some answers that ran into these continued after a 90 degree turn. So you might have 5 spaces to the left of the black square, but the answer was actually 9 letters with the last 4 written upward from the black square. As with rebuses, they don't tell you that a puzzle has this sort of thing. You are left to figure it out on your own. For that 90 degree turn example, you'd probably get it by filling in enough of the words that cross it to notice that the 5 space section matches the start of a 9 letter word that would work, and notice that the 4 letters that would complete that word are going up from the black square. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence, and then you'd go look at other places where the answers seemed to short and see that same trick works there. I don't think I've seen any the have both rebuses and non-linear answers. That would be a nightmare.