Here’s another example where the clue contains a clue. It’s also just a very fun word that I enjoyed entering into the grid.Ĥ0A. The clue “Cleaned, as a window” contains a secondary clue: the “, as a” tag that lets you know that although SQUEEGEED doesn’t always mean “Cleaned,” it does when you are talking about cleaning a window. For anyone born after the 1980s: ASTEROIDS is a 2D game where your goal, if I understood correctly, is to break asteroids into smaller asteroids. I actually “played” the “Classic arcade game set in outer space” for the first time this past weekend (“played” in scare quotes because I mostly just button-mashed), so I confidently put in ASTEROIDS. Let’s join them by diving into the clues! Tricky Cluesģ2A. I found the allure of the empty boxes waiting to be filled with the correct letter, if only I can decipher the clues, absolutely irresistible.Įven with a relatively simple Monday puzzle like this one, the drive to know the answer, to fill in the grid and hear the San Jose Strut compels puzzlers of all ability levels to break out their magnifying glasses and deerstalker hats to solve the mystery. I can’t say authoritatively that this way of thinking about puzzles will be helpful for everyone, but at least for me, the feeling that I was cracking the Case of the Mysterious Black-and-White Squares was what drew me into solving in the first place. You learn to recognize patterns and, with lots of time and practice, develop a Holmesian sense of when a clue is leading you astray or how the theme may help you unravel the mystery of which letter belongs in which box. Getting better at crossword puzzles is probably pretty similar to getting better at solving mysteries. Like mysteries, crossword puzzles have clues (76 of them today), and they have red herrings (misdirects in the clues), and they provide a deep satisfaction when you finally solve them. I was recently asked “what it is we’re doing when we solve a crossword puzzle.” Is it a trivia game? Is it an exercise in memorizing the words that appear more often? Is it a jigsaw puzzle made of words? Solving a crossword can be all of those things, but I tend to think of solving a crossword puzzle like solving a mystery. MONDAY PUZZLE - Congratulations to Pao Roy on making their New York Time Crossword debut! This puzzle is an ideal Monday solve: The theme is straightforward but original, the entries are fun but accessible and the clues are colorful but simple.

Deep crack crossword