Games

Joe Marquez treats us to a clever Monday puzzle.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesMONDAY PUZZLE — In 2017, a Styles article in The New York Times examined the cultural backlash to Venmo, an app that people in the United States use to pay one another for various services. The article argued that, rather than simplifying transactions and encouraging magnanimity among friends, “the app arguably promotes the libertarian, every-user-for-himself ethos of Silicon Valley.”I’m inclined to agree with that assessment (though I continue to rely on Venmo, to my eternal chagrin). So I was delighted to discover that the theme of today’s crossword, constructed by Joe Marquez, hinged on an expression of generosity. I hope that solving it brightens your day — and that you go brighten someone else’s afterward.Today’s ThemeThe New York Times takes the use of the term literally seriously. “When literally is used correctly,” our stylebook reads, “it is often unneeded.”The puzzle editors, however, have made an exception for today’s crossword, in which the phrase “I’m paying for this round” is described as “a literal hint to this puzzle’s theme” (59A).The figurative expression DRINKS ON ME is made literal through both the use of gray-shaded squares — inside 17-, 28- and 46-Across — and pairs of circled letters, such that the words VERMOUTH, WINE and SAKE sit squarely over the letters M-E.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Larry Snyder makes his New York Times Crossword debut.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — Let’s talk about heteronym clues. They are some of the toughest for solvers to crack because they take advantage of an interesting quirk of the human brain: We sometimes make assumptions about the written word based on our experiences. That’s especially true when we are moving quickly, as some people do when they’re solving a crossword. When we finally solve such a clue by using the crossings, we feel like kicking ourselves for not seeing it sooner.This type of clue is designed to bamboozle you. Not that you asked, but my advice is to not be too hard on yourself if you are fooled. And lean heavily on those crossings.Spoiler alert: I’m going to discuss the heteronym clue in Larry Snyder’s puzzle. If you don’t want it to be spoiled for you, please click the “Tricky Clues” jump link above and you can skip this part.Webster’s New World College Edition defines a heteronym as “a word with the same spelling as another or others, but with different meaning and pronunciation.” For example, “tear” can be a noun that means a drop of water, or a verb that means to rip.Let’s take a look at 2D. I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that those who are just getting into late-week puzzles may have had some trouble with this one. The clue is “Early number?” with a question mark, so we already know that there are shenanigans. The natural assumption is that the clue refers to numerals, and that the word “early” hints at something that happened early in history. Could the answer have something to do with Roman numerals?Congratulations, you’ve just been sent on a wild-goose chase. A solver can make some perfectly reasonable assumptions about this clue and still be wrong because the word “number” is not about numerals at all. The B sound in “number” is pronounced, and the clue is about an early form of anesthesia, or something that numbs. The answer is ETHER.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Dan Schoenholz’s initial idea for his theme was different.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTHURSDAY PUZZLE — This is the 29th crossword Dan Schoenholz has published in The New York Times. He is currently two days short of “batting for the cycle,” or having at least one puzzle published for each day of the week.I don’t know whether that’s a milestone that Mr. Schoenholz wants to achieve, but he’s just missing puzzles for Friday and Saturday. Maybe his next one will be a themeless toughie.Today’s ThemeWhen solvers *encounter (NEGATIVE) a theme like the one in Mr. Schoenholz’s puzzle, they are often required to *deconstruct (DRUM UP) the clues in order to crack the entries.Not sure what I’m talking about? Do you now suspect that I have finally gone completely off the rails? That’s entirely possible. But what if I told you that solving this puzzle boiled down to nothing more than reading the clues slightly differently from how they are written?The hint I gave in the first sentence of this theme explanation may have spilled the beans, but if you missed it, here’s the David Attenborough version:Here we see a lone Thursday theme clue, perched high atop the clue list, in search of a solver. Its elegant markings — the designation 17A and an asterisk — suggest to all who may encounter it that it is ready to be written in.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Jeffrey Martinovic points out the obvious.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesWEDNESDAY PUZZLE — The 15-letter entry at the center of today’s crossword brought to mind a memorable scene from the 1996 movie “Matilda,” in which a class of elementary school students are terrorized by their principal, Miss Trunchbull. When a student demonstrates her ease spelling this particular word — clued in today’s puzzle as the “Landmark on which most U.S. radio stations base the starts of their call signs, with ‘W’ on the east and ‘K’ on the west” (40A) — Miss Trunchbull explodes with rage.I hope you stay comparatively positive as you make your way through Jeffrey Martinovic’s grid, which offers both a wonderful Wednesday challenge and a chance to learn something new about how certain proper nouns in our language have evolved. I might even say that you’ll learn twice as much as you expect to.Today’s ThemeWhether or not you had any difficulty spelling the name of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER (40A), you might have struggled to make sense of the revealer at 63-Across. It suggests that all of today’s themed entries are TAUTOLOGICAL in relation to the bracketed languages at the end of their clues. Say that again? (Get it?)A tautology, for those unfamiliar, is the needless repetition of an idea in different words. It has a separate application — albeit a similar meaning — in logic, but here it’s intended with its simplest definition. But what makes the theme entries in today’s grid repetitive in relation to the bracketed languages that follow them? Well, let’s look at a few examples.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Robert S. Gard senses a novel opportunity.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTUESDAY PUZZLE — This is Robert S. Gard’s second crossword for The New York Times and his first crack at a theme set. His first grid, published in September 2023, was a themeless Saturday.Given what I would call a successful themed debut, I find Mr. Gard’s choice of revealer almost paradoxical. Did he second-guess his own talent while constructing, and subconsciously lace his self-doubt into the grid? Or is this just my inner 36-Across reading too deeply into things, as usual? Let’s dive in and find out together.Today’s ThemeCracking Mr. Gard’s theme requires nothing more than an appreciation of how one expression — “in different senses” (59A), our revealer winks — might apply to the entries at 17-, 25-, 36- and 49-Across.What do the “Evidence of a day at the beach” (17A) and a “Chocolate confection with a molten core” (25A) have in common? The answer isn’t immediately evident from the clues’ entries: BIKINI TAN, LAVA CAKE. They both involve warmth, at least.This theory gains shape farther down with a “Flight of fancy” (49A) — a WILD IDEA — which cooks in its own way, too. It all comes together, I think, with the “Effect of secondhand pot smoke” (36A), otherwise known as a CONTACT HIGH.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Adam Wagner orders us to enunciate.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesMONDAY PUZZLE — One crossword entry that I rarely guess correctly is “ABCs,” which is often clued as “Fundamentals” or “Kindergarten stuff.” It seems unfair that such a basic concept is so challenging for me to guess. I rank it on par for difficulty with “A to Z,” an entry I too often misread as “atoz.” (I sense a vendetta against the alphabet brewing.)In today’s crossword, Adam Wagner invites us to revisit another set of early education fundamentals with his theme. I confess that I found the trick of his entries nearly as difficult to pick up as my ABCs.Sam Ezersky, a puzzle editor for The New York Times, assured me that I wouldn’t be alone in feeling addled. “There’s lots of fancy footwork going on here,” Mr. Ezersky said of Mr. Wagner’s theme, describing it as “a nice mix of phrases, with one real brain-bender of a revealer.”Shall we get our minds in a twist together?Today’s ThemeOne word in Mr. Wagner’s revealer clue, easily missed among the others, is crucial to understanding what makes today’s theme entries special — more special than they already seem, that is.He asks us to notice “What the first word of the answer to each starred clue counts, with respect to the second word” (61A). Did you catch that? It’s subtle but brilliant: Each entry begins with a spelled-out number, which counts the SYLLABLES in its second word.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Colin Adams is a very busy person these days.Jump to: Tricky CluesFRIDAY PUZZLE — As the great sage Ferris Bueller once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

via GIPHYGiphy.comI hope Colin Adams is looking around and feeling proud of his accomplishments today. As he says in his constructor notes, 2024 has turned out to be a big year for him. If that weren’t enough, this puzzle is his New York Times Crossword debut.It’s a good one. Mr. Adams made some lively stacks in the northeast and southwest, and the long Across and Down entries were fun to write into the grid.More on this below. There will be a few spoilers, so if you don’t want to see them, scroll up to the “Tricky Clues” jump link above the Games newsletter sign-up box. Clicking the link will take you directly to the section where I discuss the clues.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Are Rich Katz and Teddy Katz pulling a disappearing act on us?Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesTHURSDAY PUZZLE — If you are here after trying to solve today’s crossword by the father-and-son team of Rich and Teddy Katz and you have gotten yourself into a tizzy, come sit right here next to me. We’re going to make sense of this.Oh, and you’re not seeing things. More about that later.Rich Katz, Teddy’s father, has had three puzzles in The New York Times, and today the younger Mr. Katz makes his Times Crossword debut. Their constructor notes suggest that the theme was Teddy’s idea, and it’s an exciting one. I hope we see more from both Katzes soon.Today’s ThemeBefore we get started with the theme, let us take a moment to admire two constructors, both named Katz, who decided to make a crossword in which we are not completely sure whether the letters in the circled squares need to be there or not. Get it? Katz/cats? Schrödinger puzzles? Is this thing on?Even if you don’t appreciate that duality, stay tuned. This is an impressive theme nonetheless.Anyway, the theme revealer at 32A is DOUBLE OR NOTHING, clued as “Risky wager … with a hint to the letters in this puzzle’s circled squares.” There are five circled squares in the grid, and each one needs a double-letter rebus to complete both the Across and Down answers.Or does it?Let’s look at the intersection of 19A and 3D. The answer to 19A’s “Disturb, in a way” is RIPPLE, with the double P entered in the circled square. At 3D, the answer to “Sat on a clothesline, say” is DRIPPED.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More