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r/crossword

▲ 8 r/crossword+1 crossposts

The first Clueless Crossword puzzle of the World

This is the first creation I share of what I call a "Clueless Crossword" puzzle, a crossword that has no clues except for the theme. This one includes all countries of the world, densely packed into a single interconnected grid.

My goal was to pack everything together as dense and interconnected as possible. This result is a 42 × 64 grid with 195 countries and 375 intersections.

I hope some of you print it out, and enjoy filling it out over the holidays! I'd love to hear your thoughts about it and how far you got!

u/enumerator0 — 1 day ago
▲ 149 r/crossword

I finally did it. 1000 day streak of NYT crossword.

In the past 1000 days, 2.74 years, I got engaged, moved, got married, had my house burn down, lost my father, designed a new house, and began reconstruction. Through vacations, weddings, funerals, late nights, long days, great highs, and terrible lows, the NYT crossword has been my daily meditation. I guess I’ll try for 2000 days now. Who knows what life will bring in the next 2.74 years?

u/paintingtrees — 3 days ago
▲ 0 r/crossword

WSP Crosswords has to be the worst thing ever

their mini crossword puzzle always has 2-3 of the most random and IRRELEVANT pop culture facts (like who tf is watching the stranger things spin off) that just messes up the entire puzzle.

its not like they're just appealing to the gays and girlies with these facts either cuz they'll shove in random ass country songs that didnt even become popular (i.e. one of the hints for a puzzle was like "first word of post malone's 2024 country hit" -> the answer was 'guy')

u/cuteobesecow — 3 days ago
▲ 5 r/crossword

NYT App - Streak Warning?

I’ve been working my way backward through the archive for a long time, back to 2014. My archive puzzles aren’t part of any streak, so I’ll use the hints from time to time, especially since the puzzles are so much more obtuse pre-Covid.

I know there’s a warning that pops up when you attempt to use a hint on a puzzle that is part of a streak, i.e. gold puzzles. But lately the warning pops up for me when I’m doing an old puzzle that isn’t part of any streak. It makes me worry that it’s somehow going to blow up my current puzzle streak, so I’ve stopped using hints.

Anyone else noticed this? Am I safe to use hints on the archive puzzles?

reddit.com
u/bryan472 — 2 days ago
▲ 5 r/crossword

New Yorker-ish crossword puzzle book recommendations?

My partner and I started doing the crossword on the last page of the (physical, printed) New Yorker magazine a few years ago, and it's become important to us. Most of them have become too easy for us, though, and we'd love to have a larger number of puzzles available to us. But, it's important to us that they're printed in a physical book, not online.

I know that styles of crosswords vary widely, and, to be honest, we're not necessarily looking to master a completely new style. Could anyone recommend a moderate-difficulty (which, I realize, is its own tangle) crossword puzzle book that might be good for us? Many thanks!

reddit.com
u/disastersquirrel — 3 days ago
▲ 61 r/crossword

Is anyone else's NYT Games app randomly closing?

In the last 2-3 days I've been trying to solve the puzzle, and a minute or two in, the app just dies and I'm back at my home screen. Could just be a glitch with my phone, so I'm curious if this is happening to anyone else.

reddit.com
u/musicismath — 5 days ago
▲ 0 r/crossword

Need a clever way to catch my friend cheating

The situation is as follows. Every day, me and two of my friends—let’s call them John and Tom—hop in a Discord call. John, who has an NYT subscription, streams the daily crossword for us, and we all partake in suggesting answers in a collaborative effort until the grid is fully completed. It’s all very fun, and I’m glad I have a group like this to complete the crosswords with. However, as you can tell by the title, there’s something off with one of the members of our little crossword clique.

I would call myself a pretty decent solver. Nothing too insane, but I can hold my own with most of the early-week puzzles, and am always quicker than my parents when we do some archive ones together. John is as good as me, if not slightly better. He’s a few years older, so he naturally possesses more niche knowledge, and I’m also pretty sure that he’s just straight up gifted. Despite that I’m usually still able to match his pace and contribute just as much as he does.

Tom, on the other hand, is a crossword savant. Not on the “pro” level of solvers that are able to complete a Saturday in 5 minutes, but still two levels ahead of me and John. I’ll give you a comparison to illustrate this. After every solve, I watch this YouTuber named Chris Remo (not an advertisement btw, but still a great channel) complete the crossword. He has over 2.6k NYT crosswords solved, not counting the minis and midis. He can solve the average crossword in around 10-20 minutes. Tom can make guesses at maybe 90% his speed, and we’ve been playing for around 3 weeks. What’s even MORE striking is that when we first started playing, Tom was worse than me and John, and now he’s suddenly the James Holzhauer of our little game nights.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about, all picked from NYT crosswords of the past week:
- Tom recognized the valley-speak theme extremely quickly. After seeing ONE “Like” in ONE word, he had already deduced the theme of the ENTIRE puzzle.
- Do you remember the theme from a few days ago with repeated endings? Yeah, he deduced it after seeing ONE word with a repeated ending. To extrapolate a pattern like that with this little experience after seeing only one hint is simply unfathomable to me.
- From today’s “Bed of Fish?” hint: He guessed “SUSHIRICE” with only one or two letters revealed.
I can’t even comprehend how it’s possible that a beginner can make that leap of logic so quickly without having already seen the answers.

And lastly, besides being much more creative and quick, he’s also way more accurate than me and John. It always feels like he’s correcting us when we suggest wrong answers, but never the other way around, In fact, I can’t even remember the last time he suggested a wrong answer.

Of course, this can all be attributed to him just being naturally gifted at crosswords. Me and John thought so too, until earlier today, when the smoking gun finally revealed itself. Tom was sharing his screen, and we both noticed that one of his tabs was a page displaying the answers to today’s crossword (after we had already completed it). Of course, it isn’t far fetched for Tom to claim that he was checking his answers or reviewing the puzzle post completion or whatnot, and it’s pretty scummy to accuse your friend on the spot like that, so we didn’t confront him. However, after discussing it privately and rehashing all the suspicious moments amongst ourselves, we’re almost 100% sure he cheats. We, being relentless and competitive vessels of justice, both want to prove without a doubt that he’s cheating as well. We are willing to go very far for this, for example tampering with inspect element to make fake hints to catch him in a trap, or something along those lines.

Reddit, bring on your most sick and twisted schemes so together we can help catch this cheater.

reddit.com
u/gonials — 4 days ago