Albert

I liked the theme but not the fill. EMEERS is just not good. Way too much junk in my opinion. I’m glad I read the column before posting, since I too was confused by “no elfly zones”. NOEL FLY ZONES is the highlight for me…now that I see it

Boom! That’s a PR at 3:22! It’s been a long time since I had a Monday PR and this one was by 20 seconds. I never have much to say about the quality or content of Monday puzzles, but it was satisfying today to fill most of the theme answers with no crosses. Thank you Shaun Phillips! (Just noticed he was able to pop his own name in the grid - nice)

Hard but really fun. This is the type of puzzle that makes me think “maybe I’m good at this”

Not the strongest fill, but overall enjoyable if you don’t mind the fun groaners - I thought they were great. FLOORITDUH and WHISKONSON were the standouts for me… they make you want to roll your eyes and laugh at the same time.

Halfway through I realized this might get me a PR - at 13:28 this marks PR number two in one week (got another one on Monday!) Very exciting, although the rush made me lose sight of most of the theme entries and a lot of fill. Looking back at it, it’s pretty cool! Side note, with only a vague idea of what Selleck and Hasselhoff look like, I filled in MOUSTACHE and then CLEFTCHIN before finally landing on CHESTHAIR. phew

This had the potential to be a new PR maker, I was scrambling to beat 9:00 but got a little lost at the bottom. Great clues and very satisfying puzzle. For anyone interested, in Senegal Eid al Adha is called Tabaski, while Eid al Fitr is called Korité. We recently celebrated Eid and had a nice time

It took me a while to figure it out, and I was so frustrated until I did. This is a puzzle that’s worth sticking with when it gets tough. I’m impressed!

This is day 500 of my streak! A streak that has overcome quite a lot to make it this far. Unfortunately I didn’t really like this puzzle, but what can you do. There’s always day 501!

Very satisfying! I don’t want to call it easy, but almost all the clues clicked well for me. I made really good time on this one. I appreciate the paintings chosen for the theme - evocative, well-known, and timeless. My one challenge here was YENTA crossing with TARTT. Never would have guessed (until I did). It’s especially nice to have The Starry Night as one of the answers, as just this year I heard the Don McLean song Vincent for the first time and have been loving it. What a great tribute to Van Gogh

I usually love Hemant Mehta’s puzzles, but this one fell pretty flat. An odd combination of being easy but with bad fill. I especially think we shouldn’t encourage “anagram minus a letter” clues… really brings down the quality in my opinion.

That was so good! Not super challenging but really good fill and overall just satisfying. Looking forward to more Friday/Saturday from Kate Hawkins

Such a good puzzle! Like many others, my first pass left a lot of empty squares. Every corner required brainpower on this one.

DIARESES? What ever happened to umlaut? I learned something new today, I thought this answer was some very strange way of calling them both diarists. A solid and pretty easy Friday, thank you Enrique!

Another example of why Fridays are the best day for crossword puzzles. I loved it but it also gave me trouble - I really had to chip away at the SW for a while. Resisting the temptation to do a lookup payed off today.

That was so good! I really loved this one. Plenty of great and even funny fill. I’m looking forward to more like this

So good! I feel like we’ve had a lot of great Fridays recently. DOGEARED and CATTOY were very well clued.

That was really good, but it did take me an embarrassingly long time to fill in the numbers. Great gimmick in my opinion and perfect for a big Sunday grid

Frustrating, but definitely on me and not the puzzle. The NW got me as well, but after a couple lookups I think it was all pretty fair. Amazingly three quarters of the puzzle took me 12 minutes, but my total time was over 32 because of the NW.

Being someone who hates gag gifts and who thought “Grest” sounded like a reasonably French name gave me some trouble in the SW corner, but after that I heard the music! I thought this was really fun. Not a fan of HOMEBANKING, but it’s fair enough I suppose

Loved this! Very fast Saturday for me but very enjoyable. Incredible cluing and fill. Only got stuck on CAMPOREES crossing SHAPERS but it all came together in the end

I think two weeks ago we had that fun Sunday puzzle with the groan inducing US state puns. While solving today’s puzzle, that one kept coming to mind. I have to say, I think today’s puzzle wasn’t nearly as successful as the state puns one. These theme entries, while I’m sure challenging to make, didn’t pay off for me at all. I found little joy in solving the themers, and in all I think this is a case of a cool and challenging idea that doesn’t work well in practice

STRATI, CAULDRON, and SMOOSHING felt pretty weak, but the theme more than made up for that. Pretty cool!