Apurv

This was so good!!!! The puns OMG. I aspire to be able to think of stuff like this. Kudos to Rena. Really loved this crossword. There were moments where we got a bit frustrated but when we figured it out then we realised "OH THAT MAKES A LOT OF SENSE AND OMG NICE". A great crossword. You should be proud of yourself.

Wow this was tough. The top left corner really got me bad. A great Saturday overall, tough with good wordplay and surprisingly very less lame crossword glue. The best part was when I cracked SESAME STREET and I went all "Oooooooohhhhhhh! Oscar!" 😂

Theme was decent, but the fill was not fun except a clue here and there, and it was also full of non-fun trivia.

This was not fun at all. The theme was okay, nothing too great. Not having the rebus in the circle was weird but the indicator gave us that hint. But the fill was so UGH inducing that for the first time in 1.5 years I did not feel like even trying to complete the top right and center areas. I just clicked on reveal puzzle and didn't read the answers because I don't even want to know. That is the level of boredom I had with this puzzle.

This crossword got me angry and irritated. This activity is supposed to be fun and challenging, but not to the level that the challenge is too hard and then no fun is left. Real life provides enough quota of frustration and irritation. I do not need my recreation to evoke the same feelings. Really bad.

A lot of the trivia is just wayyy too... obscure. This crossword is like the boss level of crosswords where years and years of solving and gaining info leads up to a final moment, answer by answer. And I am definitely not on Mr. (Lord?) Byron's wavelength. When I revealed the answer for 46 years, it was a "what the actual #&₹@" moment in all senses of the phrase. Awe, surprise, excited exclamation, frustration, anger, elation, and an increase in admiration for the answer and the setter, everything everywhere all at once. For a couple more too. Another very intresting part was that a good amount of trivia was from all around the world. Awe striking again. While I got some, like HINDUGOD (see my location, duh) immediately, I was stuck at a lot of them. But after solving or revealing, I realised that a lot of it was not ungettable. I just needed some essential crosses which I couldn't today. And yeah, a mental wavelength matching. For example, yesterday was a breeze for me because I was somehow one with the grid.

Assam is in Northeastern India, not northwestern.

This was a really great grid. Solid theme with good theme entries, interesting and fun fill, and a lot of hard trivia but all the answers were mostly gettable through crosses (with a couple of forgivable exceptions). Amazing work! Looking forward to more from the setter.

Now this was a worthy crossword. The theme was on point and the proper nouns that were ungettable for me (because I am not from the US) had crossing entries that made me able to get them. The overall difficulty was above average, and the difficulty of the clues was apt so that after getting the answer you feel fulfilled, not irritated by the unnecessary mental gymnastics. Good crossword.

This was an amazing puzzle. Enjoyed it thoroughly. The fill was interesting and fresh. Also some of the theme entries are alliterative! Great experience.

A good crossword. Loved the theme, all the theme entries, the other fill, and the theme's aptness to the Valentine week. Hall of fame 2026.

When I saw the names of Adrian and Christina, I knew that this crossword would be a treat, and it really was (not lying to anyone!). Smart clues and a flawless fill. One awkward entry here and there is fine, and the crosses were generous enough for them. Great experience!

Theme was good. But the rest of the fill was very very bad. Disappointing.

It was great, but I did not like the SKU/KAREN/ELGIN group. I cannot guess the K and N over here. Elgin is not a guessable name. Same for Sku. These were bad entries. Ruined the end for me as I had to google/reveal.

This is a rare Crossword where the fill was really great but the theme was so bad.

Amazing crossword! No random niche proper nouns, no crosswordese entries. The grid felt fresh and fun. I did it quite quickly, which is unusual for a Friday, but I have no complains as the grid and the entries were quite fun to solve.

This was not a good puzzle. I did it in 23 minutes (much faster than my average) and still was not happy even a bit. I did not enjoy the random stretches the answers are doing vis-a-vis the clues. Also I think Endgame was the last movie in the saga. But it fit so I wrote that and it was correct. A lot of this happened today. Not happy at all with so many uninteresting entries. We have a had a great week. Some answers were really amazing yesterday and on Thursday. Saturday is a bore.

The puzzle was fine, but the theme was really very weird. I read the blog to get the thing and was like "Oh. Okay." but I do not think this deserved a Wednesday slot. it should have been a Monday or, at best, a Tuesday. The midi today did a better prank on us by invoking DEJA VU.

The name was nuclear fusion so I expected some amazing play here, but was disappointed that it was just a double rebus. The amount of effort it took to uncover the theme (because I was expecting and working around for something new) was not worth the reward for me. Could have just named the crossword something normal and I would not have expected a unique trick. This one's on the team/setter solely. The fill was fresh and did not have a lot of slop. Some answers were fun to decode. But the center block was so so bad. I did it at the end and it has left me with a bad aftertaste. Overall a so so for me. Had fun but also got irritated, which is an undesirable outcome.

This required a lot of patience and a nap in between, but it was worth it in the end. Today was where you fill in something and see where it goes, and then backtrack if it is not going anywhere. And use some Sudoku like logic to see which letters cannot logically fit in the squares ahead according to English phonology. Quite fun, although I could have done with a fewer proper nouns in the bottom right section.

2026 crossword hall of fame. Loved it.

🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

That was a really good fill! A few red herrings here and there and some intelligent clues. Loved it.

This was good. I liked it. The theme was interesting, the reveal was fresh (even though such a common phrase) and the fill was not clunky or drab. The puzzle was easier than most Thursdays, but it was good.

This was fun. I guessed the theme mechanism wrong twice 😂 and then finally got it right. The fill was good. Just the MARILYN/OHLORDY cross got me bad. I have never heard the phrase with a Y at the end, but well.

I didn't like some parts of the fill. Too niche trivia. I hate it when I am just sitting there with no option but to google it out because even the crosses are not working. At least make the entry gettable through the crosses, which is what all good crosswors do. The theme was nice but the fill ruined it for me.

This was...so underwhelming. The theme was utterly basic for a Thursday. The fill was not very interesting, the cluing was just slightly fun, bordering on fun. This should have been a Tuesday, not a Thursday. After the great fill (even if the theme was really mid) yesterday I was expecting much more out of this.

This puzzle was a treat (literally as well!). The fill was flawless and the cluing great. A good Sunday experience.

The cluing and answers were quite fun. I solved it far too quickly somehow. And after weeks of cribbing and getting irritated about Saturdays being too hard, I never thought I'd become one of those people who think that this should have been a bit harder 🤯🙉

This was fun. Quite easy for me personally, but I loved it. The fill was partly fresh and the theme entries were a good solve.

After trying to get through this crossword I realised that throwing myself off a cliff, repeatedly banging my head on a rock, deliberately falling down a flight of 500 stairs, and calling the devil through an Ouija board seemed like less torturous options than this absolute hellhole of obscure trivia and no decent crossing entries to help. This crossword was so bland that a glass of water tasted like aged scotch to me. A puzzle so bad that I would rather eat an entire charred truck tire than try to complete it. The setters need to realise that trying to outsmart their audience is not the goal. It is to let them have fun while deciphering the clues. And the total snobs who feel this crossword was "the greatest" just because it was hard are the real scums of this planet, much more than the setter. I want a word challenge, not a mesh of obscure trivia that makes even the most duplicitous backstabbers seem like the bestest of friends. Dude, seriously, please, make a good crossword, not this pile of horse excreta that you are trying to masquerade as a "great" crossword.

The grid pattern was really great, but the left half of the puzzle was not really fun. It was just harder, but the wordplay did not reveal any interesting answers.

Oxes?????? Are you kidding me. Nerts! Puppy love. Oxes indeed. This puzzle was decently good but the top left section was so bad that it overshadowed everything else.

A lot of the people will be very happy with this puzzle because it is a "proper Saturday" due to the difficulty, but I did not like it. Almost half of the fill was not fun at all. It was drab. Too dry. Way too boring. A challenging puzzle can be fun as well, but this wasn't. I won't call a Saturday good just because it was hard, it also needs to have interesting entries. I did notice the METHANE crossing with TOXIC GAS, but that did not incite any joy after the juiceless grind.

Regarding the Midi, mongoose is not a Hindi origin word! It originally is a Marathi word which eventually came from Telugu. This makes it a Proto-Dravidian descendant. Hence it isn't even in the same language family as Hindi! I think a basic fact check needs to be put into place by NYT before crosswords are published.

Good Saturday. Challenging. My only error was CLE. I wrote it as CLA 🙄. The amount of self frustration is immeasurable.

Today was my quickest Sunday ever 😂 The puzzle was great, but there were a couple of rough entries here and there like CD DRIVE and TERABIT as somebody already pointed out. Apart from that I liked a lot of answers. The grid seemed fresh, I could only fill very few answers on my first scan. I would have wanted a bit more of a challenge but this week's Friday and Saturday were quite challenging so the Sunday giving us a break is fine imo.

I understand this is an Adam Wagner crossword and there are always some quirks in them, but using bonsamis and rotorooter was a bit too extra. These entries were jutting out like a sore thumb in an otherwise good Wednesday.

A real disappointment for me was chapati being that answer and not parotta/paratha. Why force a chakla into the clue when your answer is going to be the same old bland chapati. The top entries are real smart clues, but lip for brink and beg for solicit are just frustrating as they're not quite smart but are just a stretch. After a few such needlessly confusing entries, the fun of solving is lost and when I further unravel some real smart clues, I don't feel satisfied now because I am already irritated.

No. The theme was fun, but a lot of the cross entries in order to make it were not.

This was a very weird puzzle. Some part of the fill was clunky and not fun. And the theme wasn't so great as to justify the weird top right corner for example. Theme was okay. I honestly didn't even know two of them and still was able to get them, but not because the crosses helped. I could guess because of ideas how movie posters work 😂 The crossws didn't help at all. Even after I got the theme entries, some crosses were still out of my comprehension, and weren't even fun with any pun or anything. Could have been a good run, the fill needed to be better.

Quite a few good clue - answer pairs but quite a whole lot of drab non-fun fill ruined it for me. I would have loved the trivia for some of them if I wasn't irritated by them.

UGHHHHHHH!!!

This was interesting. Although it could have done better with maybe a couple of proper nouns less in the top right corner. But well, it probably is on me that I had completely forgotten about BUBBA, so yeah. Rest of the grid, I like some clue-answer pairs. And most of the proper nouns (apart from top right) were gettable through crosses.