John Deal

I'm not weighing in one way or the other—while I found this to be a pretty easy Thursday solve, I don't have any strong feelings about it—but I think this is the first time I've seen Ms. Amlen kind of, well, slag a puzzle. Admittedly, I've only been reading Wordplay for a year and change, but I was a bit startled. Not disapproving (she is entitled to her opinion, certainly). Just wasn't expecting it.

Oof, today was brutally hard for me; I usually take between ten and twenty minutes for a Saturday, but I struggled with this grid for close to an hour. I know there are lots of folks here, either more skilled or more masochistic than I, who will have loved this puzzle, but I found most of it unpleasantly sloggy.

Not a brainbuster, and I apprehended the theme quickly, but honestly I don't remember the last time I had this much fun with a Thursday. This puzzle was delightful start to finish.

Easy puzzle, iffy theme.

The "don't say anything negative" squad is out in force again today. Look, friends: sometimes a body just needs to vent. Let people blow off a little steam about a tricky puzzle, and stop being so ironically critical of their criticisms. (I suspect at least several of the folks carping about the negativity of commenters here would rally to defend Deb Amlen's far-from-complimentary words about Joe Marquez's grid in this week's Thursday Wordplay column. Coarse invective obviously excluded, it's okay not to like a thing, and to say so when the thing in question is broadcast to a wide public and thus fair game for public praise or censure.)

Oof. This took me twice my Saturday usual. I'm torn between lauding the clues I genuinely loved even though they were brutal ("10-point play" was inspired) and the ones that were so ain't-I-cute clever that the solve became harder if the solver knew anything about the subject (looking at you, SAKEBAR—no one would *ever* talk about sake in shots: not connoisseurs, and not frat boys [sake *bombs*, sure]). I also disliked PEDIATRIC for "childish"—is that meant to be witty? There's hard and fair and funny—which I adore and hope for every Saturday—and then there's hard and confused and self-indulgent. With respect, this puzzle was too much of the latter for my taste.

Yesterday I wrote, "It may just be me, but I've found most of the recent Friday puzzles much trickier than their Saturday sequels. I'll be curious to see if the pattern holds tomorrow; this one was a good, chewy workout." Little did I know! Got the solve, but at double my average time, and only after a decent amount of brute-forcing. I can't say I had a lot of fun with this one; I'm up for a challenge, especially on Saturday, but a lot of the clues here felt opaque rather than teasingly witty.

I found everything pretty manageable until I hit the southwestern quadrant; the puzzle as a whole took me about 250% of my usual Saturday time, and easily three quarters of that was spent despairing of ever solving the SW. Tough, but very satisfying when I finally put it to bed.

I enjoyed the workout here, and found most of the puzzle just right for a Friday. I stumbled in the northwest, though—when you convince yourself that 1D is NEPAL because then the cross at 19A can be ATEAM, you make things needlessly hard on yourself. Once I realized my error, that quadrant fell easily enough too.

What fun! At first this grid looked daunting, but it proved exactly difficult enough to make me sweat but not to make me cry.

Holy cats! I am in awe as well. Easy solve, but the brilliance of the gimmick eluded me until I read the "Wordplay" explanation. Now I can't stop shaking my head in wonderment.

This one was...fine? I was hoping for a little more zing from a Thursday, to be honest. I appreciate the difficulty of creating this grid, but it didn't give me that brain-melting satisfaction I always hope for from this day of the week. Instead, I got a cutesy tribute to a toy. More power to anyone who had a lot of fun with this puzzle, but I was pretty nonplussed.

Managed a personal best time on this quite easy-for-a-Thursday puzzle. I enjoyed it well enough, but was hoping for a *bit* more struggle than I got.

I don't mind the new app layout, but it would be *really* nice if the Games app allowed you to access the Wordplay column for any given puzzle directly from said puzzle itself. Having to hop over to the Times app and click through several nested sections is tedious. (Cute puzzle today, but yeah, really easy. Only missed a personal-best time because I solved on my phone.)

It may just be me, but I've found most of the recent Friday puzzles much trickier than their Saturday sequels. I'll be curious to see if the pattern holds tomorrow; this one was a good, chewy workout.

Ugh. I finished with no hints or lookups, but gods above was this a viciously Natick-y puzzle. I sussed out the gimmick right away and blitzed through the vast majority of the grid, but at the end I had to waste a whole lot of minutes playing the plug-in-arbitrary-letters game in a few spots in order to get the win. I'm not complaining that there were answers I didn't know in this grid, but some of the crosses were needlessly, nastily obscure. Just glad I'm done and can move on to more enjoyable puzzles.

Pretty breezy even for a Sunday, but it's hard to argue against the importance of the revealer.

Fun puzzle, and (as has often been the case for me of late), a much quicker solve than the Friday puzzle that preceded it. One cavil? "The Lord of the Rings" isn't actually a trilogy; it's one book. It was originally published in three volumes only because of paper shortages and attendant pricing issues in the postwar United Kingdom. The practice stuck, but Tolkien always considered his most famous work to be a single literary entity.

A delightful and witty debut, and a pleasantly brisk Friday, especially after the last few weeks. I struggled at first, bouncing around the grid in the hopes of gaining purchase somewhere, but finally the southeast started to break for me, and it was smooth sailing after that. Bravo, Mr. Bunch!

Good fun, this. Pretty brisk for a Saturday, though I too wrestled a bit with the southeast corner.

This was delightful.

Pleasantly swift and smooth, especially given that earlier today as part of my process of working backward through old Saturday puzzles I almost went mad struggling with the September 12, 2020, grid.

This was good fun!