Gabrielle

With 2.6 million daily users of the NYT Games app (per a Vanity Fair article citing data from mid-October 2023), and the NYT using Games as a centerpiece of its growth strategy, you’d think they could figure out formatting on the app… A real disservice to the constructors as well as the users. If underlining doesn’t work, what about italics, or displaying some letters in a different font color?

Loved it. I’ve been wishing the NYT would Make Saturdays Challenging Again and this one delivered! Very little came easily, but chew on it for a while and the squares slowly start to reveal themselves. More like this, please.

Really enjoyed this one. I thought the obscure trivia was pretty much all gettable via crosses. I also have never heard of ELLIE Bamber or ESSIE Davis or LEONORA Carrington, but they were easy enough to figure out once some crosses fell into place. #MakeSaturdaysHardAgain

Going against the grain here, but I liked this one! Very satisfying and fun solve. I thought it was obvious from the beginning (AILS/TAILS) that some letters were outside the grid, the revealer wasn’t too hard to get, and I didn’t find any of the trivia too obscure except OGEE, which was easily gettable via crosses. Letters outside the grid or in black squares is a known feature of tricky Thursdays and have been some of my favorites (see 9/23/21, 4/30/22 as examples). Embrace it as learning a new trick!

Enjoyed this puzzle a lot -- but I especially love that the original seed of the puzzle was RAGTIME and the martini theme came later! It presented as an extremely elegant and intentionally written martini puzzle, so I'm very impressed that the martini theme took shape after the puzzle was well underway.

Clever theme, but I didn’t love a lot of the fill required to make the theme work - lots of obscure words and obscure proper names! (TAW and TALI to make WIRED, RAIMI crossing RILL and LAINE, ERA detergent crossing ERNO Rubik…) I solved without any lookups in the end, but lots of crossings required pure guesswork. Not too fun.

Perfect Saturday puzzle! Barely got anything on my first pass through the grid, but with persistence was able to slowly fill it in. Lots of "oh, yes, DUH" moments when I cracked a tricky clue, and fairly light on the obscure trivia. Thank you, Blake, and more Saturdays like this, please, NYT!

Incredible crossword. Loved the simple elegance of the theme and the long spanners. Rarely am I wowed by a Tuesday but this definitely did it!

Loved it. Barely anything on my first pass but it slowly came together for me. ASH CARTER / MR LONELY area was the last to go for me - I was stuck for too long on the concept of SO LONELY or IM LONELY. Didn’t know GALOIS / OCELO but guessed based on French phonology and then LEA SALONGA dredged herself up from the depths of my memory into vague recognition. This is the kind of satisfying Saturday solve I’m looking for! #MakeSaturdaysHardAgain