ok i like doing crossword puzzles and “the easter bunny” put a couple of books in my basket and well there in between mediocre and well shi-
these are made by “kappa publishing the #1 in crosswords/word find books” their words not mine i think there were from dollar tree
Between the repeating clues/words misspelled words … clues that are wrong …their abbreviation fetish
they have a licensed tv guide puzzle book also that’s the same quality …
the puzzles seem to be "but 100 words and clues in a program and randomly use them to make the puzzle …
I’ve probably complained about this before and im remembering why i haven’t bought a CW book in a few years … what happened to dell and the old companies?
You can buy collections of newspaper crosswords from NY Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post. . . These books are usually graded by difficulty. For instance, NY Times offers collections of Monday and Tuesday puzzles (easy) and Friday and Saturday puzzles (hard). There are Sunday collections for those who like bigger puzzles.
Do you like regular crosswords or cryptics? If it’s cryptics, the Guardian has a good one every day on their website. Plus they have archives going back 20 years.
Never heard of Kappa crossword puzzles. The first time I tried anything other than Dell Crosswords taught me a hard lesson: Dell were the only folks that followed crossword conventions for the clues and answers. The second time I tried was a blame sight better as it was my introduciton to Games magazine, sadly now out of print. I don’t tend to do crosswords anymore because I haven’t seen a Dell Crossword since Adam was a lad.
My go-to used to be the NY Times late-week collections (Friday/Saturday). Other than the old Games Magazine “World’s Most Ornery Crossword Puzzle”, they’re the most challenging straight crosswords I’ve ever experienced (as opposed to cryptics, which I just don’t have the knack for).
Games World of Puzzles (which is published by Kappa) is still in print, nine times a year (and it has included a few of Games’s features, like Wild Cards).
I get it sometimes when traveling, and it is still pretty good. Not many crosswords though, more variety puzzles, which I like.
I do the NY Times puzzle every day, and there are tons of NY Times puzzle books. You can adjust the difficulty level by picking which days puzzles to buy.
There was a spurt of American cryptic books, but they’ve vanished. twikster said that people bought them and were then stymied, so series books didn’t work.
I don’t know about the Guardian puzzles, but there is a book of puzzles from Chambers (who makes the dictionary which is standard for English cryptics) which does not have a lot of UK specific clues or answers, which are tough for Americans. The London Times books are especially bad about this. I have a Daily Telegraph book which is okay, but Chambers would be my first choice.
NYT Sunday puzzles are excellent, and published in collections. I have a collection in my briefcase at all times–and they have come in handy during flight delays, long waits for the doctor or dentist, and so on. Challenging, but not impossible.
I’m addicted to the NY Times Sunday puzzles, and one of the books of these is always in our bathroom. I also have a backlog of “World’s Most Ornery” that I haven’t gotten to.
Rule of thumb: If you care about quality, stick with crosswords where the constructor is credited by name. This mostly rules out the crap at the dollar store.
Newspaper crosswords, at least the best of them, are very good (NY Times and others of similar quality—the Wall Street Journal has been publishing good crosswords for some time now); and books reprinting them are often published.
Also, various sources (including but not limited to those newspapers) offer their crossword puzzles online—some for free, some restricted to subscribers—that you can either solve online or download and print out. For example, legendary constructor Merl Reagle died a few years ago, but his website still offers a weekly rerun of one of his Sunday-size puzzles, which are usually pretty good.
Yeah, I always have a book of New York Times crosswords around. That’s my measuring stick for quality puzzles. I bought a Dell book at a gas station, expecting the worst, but – at least the book I bought – had interesting and playful cluing, and was a satisfying cruciverbaling experience.
For NYTimes, Thursday is probably my favorite day, but the collection I have is Monday through Saturday. (I’m actually weird in that I’m not a fan of the oversized Sunday puzzle.) Thursday puzzles are usually the tricky/gimmicky puzzles that may have gimmicks like rebuses (multiple letters in a square in a theme answer), backward answers, numbers, symbols, etc. I mean, most don’t, but all those are fair game for a Thursday, just so you know. But they are more tricky in the cluing. Fridays and Saturdays tend to have an open grid with a lot of long multi-word answers.
Yeah, that typically happens on Thursdays. So watch out for that. You’ll also occasionally find numbers or symbols, too. The more-than-one-letter-in-a-square is called a rebus in crossword lingo. Note that both examples are Thursday puzzles. There’s all sorts of oddball trickery that could happen on a Thursday–that’s part of the fun of them. Just be on your toes if you’re doing a Thursday New York Times crossword and think outside the box if the theme answers aren’t gelling for some reason. There may be a trick of some sort going on.
Barnes & Noble has a rack full of crossword books, though it’s smaller now than it used to be. It might help to flip through them and try a few clues in your head to get a feel for their level.
One publisher has a chart on the back cover for degree of difficulty and whether they are modern or traditional. (No four letters in a box for traditional. They are common in the NYTimes Sundays.)
I like the Sunday puzzles. The NYTimes are the hardest, with the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times distinctly easier. Warning: local puzzles often have local clues. And the books stay in print forever, so you sometimes can get clues that would be current to newspaper readers but are from 2008 and lost to us today.
