New York Times Crossword Answers for Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky Clues

TUESDAY PUZZLE — Step right up, puzzle lovers, step right up! The theme of today’s crossword, constructed by Per Bykodorov in his New York Times debut, hinges on an expression that probably comes from the traveling carnivals of the 19th century.

Let’s take a spin and test our luck together, shall we? Unlike most of the unapologetically rigged games at carnivals, this puzzle can be played fair and square(s).

Today’s Theme

Round and round the circled letters go, and what they mean, nobody knows! Now that I’ve run out of carnival barks, though, I can explain what’s going on.

Four rows of this puzzle contain a set of five circled letters each. An identical number of circles repeated across rows or columns usually indicates some kind of anagram-based theme. We can confirm this by solving a couple of the entries that contain those circled letters. 16A, [Like a film that’s both sad and funny], solves to TRAGICOMIC, and 22A, [Ben & Jerry’s flavor honoring a jam band legend], to CHERRY GARCIA. This makes a couple of things clear: The letters we’re working with are A-C-G-I-R, and the answer almost certainly has to do with what they unscramble to spell — CIGAR.

Carnival games apparently used to offer liquor and smokes as top prizes, even above all the giant stuffed animals! That would certainly explain how the baby in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” got his hands on a stogie. In any case, it’s as sensible an explanation as any for why we use the phrase at the center of today’s puzzle to mean [Not quite right] — CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR (35A). And it also tells us what’s going on with the circled letters: They’re never arranged in the right order to spell “cigar.”