I’ve been gradually working my way into more and more difficult crosswords. Went through an entire batch of the Wednesday repeats. Moving on to Thursday. THEY SUCK!
I don’t mind the hard words or the hard clues - they make me work harder. But it’s the gimmicks with some words spelled backwards or part of the answer omitted for chuckles. One recent puzzle had the letters EAT omitted from every answer that would have included them such as thEATer.
For those of you that do crosswords, will this be a common feature if I move onto Friday and Saturday? I’ll probably be dead before I’m daring enough to tackle Sunday.
For me, part of the fun of the Thursday and Saturday puzzles is figuring out the “gimmick”. Once you catch on, the rest of the puzzle is much easier. If you get stuck, they have a Wordplay blog with hints.
You mean Thursday and Sunday, of course. Saturday doesn’t usually have a theme.
Friday and Saturday don’t have those gimmicks, but they are much harder than Wednesday. I like Thursdays – you’re looking at it thinking, this is just impossible, and huh?, and so forth, and then you get the theme and the puzzle falls beautifully.
Did you do the recent Wednesday that had the thoughts of people solving each weekday puzzle? It was pretty funny, but fairly recent so I won’t spoil it.
Thursdays are reserved for gimmicks like that. I believe I may have seen rebus (multiple letters in a single square) clues very occasionally in other puzzles, but it’s almost exclusively reserved for Thursdays (along with many other gimmicks.) Yesterday’s Thursday was annoying to me, but, generally, Thursday is my favorite crossword of the week, because I like the extra cleverness. Some people absolutely hate it, though.
One thing to keep in mind: if there is a gimmick, it won’t be completely random. It should be obliquely explained or at least hinted at, either in the puzzle’s title or somewhere within the puzzle itself. For example, the puzzle you describe might have a title like “Eat Out”; or “EAT” might be one of the words in the puzzle, probably toward the bottom, clued as something like “What has been removed from the theme answers.” So it sometimes helps to look through the clues to see if one of them hints at what’s going on with the theme or gimmick.
Sorry, yes, I meant the Thursday and Sunday puzzles; normally I only do Sunday through Friday, skipping Saturday (because of the reported difficulty). I used to download the crossword file and do it offline but they stopped offering that about a year ago, so now I do them online. And they make a game out of timing you and comparing your time to previous puzzles for that day.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s MUCH easier doing crosswords in an app or a browser. I never used to be able to do Fridays and Saturdays, because I wouldn’t put in answers that I was pretty tentative about. Once you put in the wrong answer, try to erase, try again, scribble it out, it gets to be unreadable. Electronically, I put in guesses all the time.
Yes, there’s a big difference between Wednesday and Friday/Saturday. I don’t see much difference between Friday and Saturday other than fewer black spaces in Saturday.
The gimmicks are for Thursday (almost always) and Sunday (sometimes). Sunday is a bigger grid and a bit of a slog to get through. Sunday difficulty is somewhere between Wednesday and Friday with some whimsy thrown in.
Themed puzzles are not gimmicks though. Themed have several related answers based on word-play, gimmicks are construction weirdness and rebuses etc. Monday and Tuesday are usually themed. Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday are usually theme-less. AFAIK Sundays are also always themed.
OK, just checked to remind myself. It was fun. (BTW, one thing I dislike is when the clue calls for the Spanish, French or Latin translation of a word or phrase.)
I don’t like answers about the word itself. Like, “defend borders?”, with the answer “DEES” – get it? The letter D borders “defend”. Look, if I wanted to do puns and anagrams, I would wait for every fourth Sunday, or whatever it is.