Dan W

I've been doing the NYT Crossword daily for over 20 years, but I've recently lost patience with it. Challenging puzzles used to involve misdirect clues and clever wordplay. Now they are too often trivia contests. I know many people love trivia, and some enjoy Googling for answers, so I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with the NYT Crossword's new trend. It's just not fun for me. Can anyone recommend a crossword publisher that provides "old school" crosswords: answers that are widely known words, but with challenging cluing?

I asked ChatGPT "without searching the web, what is a 9-letter word for 'shopgirl in a paris boutique'", and it came up with "demoiselle". Asked Gemini the same, and it answered "vendeuse" Now I feel somewhat less dumb. I'm surprised at the over-the-top difficulty, since I usually find BEQ's puzzles fun: more wordplay than obscure trivia. I can only guess that NYT asked him to come up with something extremely challenging. I've often thought that they should display a warning at the beginning of such puzzles: "For experts only". I think that would cut down on the number of complaints. Us mere mortals would heed their warning and move on with the rest of the day.

My quickest Sunday solve ever, yet not at all enjoyable for me. It was a mainly a list of trivia questions with little in the way of clever cluing. Fun for beginners, I suppose.