Stephen

Add me to the chorus of people who found this strangely difficult for a Tuesday, much more of a Thursday. But the difficulty really isn’t a sticking point — a “hard” Tuesday is still a relatively painless solve. There was just this uncanny aspect to the phrases…worded differently than I’d expect them to be, never coming together in a satisfying way. Different wavelengths!

I’m usually not one of the complainers, but this is probably the first Monday I’ve seen with a genuine Natick. VIGODA crossing IMPEI and ALDA? I didn’t struggle with them, but it feels meaner than a typical Monday would be.

For me, this was a great example of the sort of puzzle that seems extremely hard on Pass 1 (very few confident answers), but gets progressively easier the more times you give it a spin. Really satisfying solve.

BELA / LENAPE seemed a little tough for a Tuesday. But a fun solve nonetheless

Very confidently wrote THE FE LADY for 16A as my first fill, and was certain I’d blindly guessed the theme. Took a while to correct that one!

Spent over half my time trying to find the single square that was wrong, which would up being the cross of 1A and 3D. Look, I’m not saying ScARF is the only valid dictionary word, and as a non-military guy, I know that all the things I imagined “cCO” stood for were probably wrong ([Chief/Central/etc] Commanding Officer) compared to the more well known NCO. All I’m saying is that I will never think of the word “SNARF” in any context but the Thundercats.

Judging by the comments, it seems like this was a lot of folks’ first introduction to rebus puzzles. Which is surprising to me: I only started solving in January, and feel like the “Thursday is often a rebus” concept was drilled into my head a dozen times at this point. Anyway, welcome everyone! If you hate rebuses, you’re in good company on the comments thread. But aside from the volume and predictability of their locations, there’s nothing new about this puzzle from a gameplay standpoint. Don’t take it out on the constructor! Signed, Someone who was wildly confused on his first Thursday solve, and didn’t even know the word “rebus” until he read the angry comments section.

Breezy puzzle, but both “AMUSEMENT ARCADE” and “CLAW MACHINE GAME” felt oddly redundant to me. I know them as Arcades and Claw Machines, respectively.

Really just an excellent Friday puzzle

I agree that this was easier than a typical Sunday, but calling this Monday level difficulty is just absurd. We get quite a bit of mileage out of knowing certain book titles (or, let’s be honest, movies) and proper names, but without that knowledge I see plenty of crossings that would be tough. DANGEROUS LIAISONS crossing OPAH, ONEL, COSI, ERDŐS. THE GREAT ESCAPE crossing ED MCMAHON and ERTE. Some wordplay and intentionally vague clueing, especially for all the 3 letter fill along the sides. Did I find it on the easy side? Totally. I also happened to get the spanners pretty quickly, and knew a good bit of the crossing trivia without a thought (ex: I’ve long been proud to have an Erdős number of 3). But I can easily imagine solvers who would crush Monday - Wednesday still struggling plenty here, especially if they’re on the millennial side and don’t remember some of the theme clues. (Note: I am a millennial myself, and I only learned about Prince of Tides, Dangerous Liaisons, and Age of Innocence later in life as a cinephile — certainly not as any kind of cultural touchstone.)

I probably had something close to the ideal experience the constructor had in mind. Caught PASSOVER and realized it had to be OVERPASS, started hunting for other phrases to flip, got maybe half of them before the revealer (OPPOSITES ATTRACT) made me notice the symmetry between PAT DOWN and UP CHARGE. That let me pre-fill OUT, UNDER, and ON, which really clicked the rest of the puzzle in place. Not the hardest Thursday, but a really fun solve!

Solved the puzzle fairly quickly, only to spend another 15 minutes checking every cross before finally concluding that I needed to input LINE as hyphens. (Yes, I understand “DASHED LINE” as a revealer, but one could also argue you have to “DASH” the word LINE as an action of viewing in order to read the down answers…e.g. it isn’t clear to me that this mandates only one input type.)

Folks are free to complain about anything they want, and god knows I’ve indulged. But I am surprised at how many people felt like this should have been a rebus. Given the revealer, it never occurred to me: A rebus wouldn’t be “inflating” the grade, it would just be showing two grades side by side. When the revealer is about transforming a word letter into another word or letter, isn’t it always just a straight replacement?

I had a great time solving this one, but am honestly shocked to not see more negativity in the comments. The single rebus, yes, but also for my money this was closer to a Friday in difficulty. YMMV!

At the risk of being that guy: TGEL crossing WELTY is a textbook example of a natick, right? With that said? A fun and breezy puzzle. I for one don’t mind the occasional proper noun collision.

As others have noted, this was on the easier side: At a little over 10 minutes, this was far and away my fastest Saturday (previous record was something like 15). But I’m not coming here to brag (others have and will continue to post much better times!) or complain (I’m happy for a break!). I’m coming here to say that the fill was excellent, and the constructor did a fantastic job. Staring at the finished puzzle, I really have to admire how it all fits together. The only difference between this and a “hard” Saturday solve is the lack of obfuscation around a handful of clues. If some of the longer entries (say RIDDLE ME THIS, COLD OPENS, HERE BE DRAGONS, COME TO A BAD END, NOT A GOOD IDEA) had been the result of misleading wordplay rather than clued directly, this could have easily taken double the time. Easy tweaks the editors could have pushed for if they wanted to; clearly, they wanted to be nice to us this week.

I’ll join in the choir and say that while I had no trouble with the puzzle’s theme, it did irk me a bit that the wording was “Instruction for answering ____” when in fact the direction only makes sense as an instruction for *interpreting* the answer of _____. Ex, we are not changing X to Y when we write the answer, we are changing X to Y when we parse the answer. Feels like a simple thing to fix with verbiage, with zero changes to the actual puzzle. With that said, it was very very early on that these were flipped, so the gameplay was largely unaffected. I found the puzzle a joy to solve. My hat off to the constructor! I just wish the editors had reworded the theme clues to better reflect the trick.

Hardest Friday in recent memory, and I mean that as a complement!

No lookups, but man did I have to work for it. One of the toughest Saturdays in recent memory!

A very challenging Sunday for those of us who aren’t sports inclined! Eventually got it without lookups, but BLEDSOE, NLMVP, the proper Bruins to get BOSTON POPSICLE…ouch!

Had to get ALgA / gREAVES through trial and error , but who said Sunday had to be easy? Nice puzzle!

Maybe it’s the computer scientist in me, but I found the theme extremely easy to catch — and I defaulted to writing “!” because it seemed like the only clean way to do it. New Thursday record for me!

Can’t say I struggled too much with this one (6:13 to solve) but it did feel both crunchier and sweatier than your typical Monday. The vowel run helps explain the combo, though add me to the list of solvers who didn’t notice it until I read this column afterwards.

Came to this page specifically to praise this puzzle’s construction, only to discover the age of the constructor! Just a phenomenal debut. There’s so much thought that went into stacking this together: TYPEFACE crossing SERIF, NEON TETRA crossing STAR FACED MOLE, the pairing of SENORITAS and MUCHACHAS. Everything just felt like it was meant to be there. Well done!

Fun, and pretty simple for the most part! Though I do feel like NUMISMATIST crossing USURER feels just a tad more advanced than a typical Wednesday? At the same time, there’s no way the rest of this puzzle would be a Thursday or higher, so it makes sense where it landed.

Super fun Sunday solve! I have some gripes with the crossing of NICOL and EDOM with PERIDOT and IONA and HODGES with LEANDER, but your mileage may vary — I know better than to call something a **tick in this here comments section, and also did still manage to solve without assistance. On the flip side, I almost feel like the revealer could have been obfuscated more! When I blind guessed MARTINI, I was so excited to fill JAMES BOND based on a clue like “Frequent drinker of 33D” — was honestly surprised to see how much 111A and 113A bend over backwards to make it clear to a solver. Anyway, I only say this because I loved the puzzle, and wanted to spend even longer with it. A marvelous debut.

Thought this was appropriately tough for a Friday, but was surprised to see I’d hit a new personal best when the bell rang! 15 minutes. Others will surely scoff that this is what qualifies as a Friday record, but I’m feeling good.

I found this puzzle to be a breeze after a particularly tough Friday. But other commenters have called yesterday easy and today difficult, which is just further evidence that all of this is wildly subjective.

Count me among the solvers who found Tuesday, Wednesday, and today’s all harder than usual. Still fun! They just seem to have more tricky clueing and/or less immediately recognizable names than I’m used to.

This is what the commentariat get after complaining about easy puzzles! Tough but fair. What a doozy — er, LULU

A refreshingly tough Sunday! First, the trick. My experience was similar to a few Thursdays of years past, in that I partially “figured it out” early, but only *actually* figured it out late — and the long swath in between was maddening. In this case, I realized early on that I would need to drop certain letters from certain across entries in order to make things work. How the letters got dropped felt somewhat random, and I went through all sorts of false beliefs about what dictated it (the borrowed letter being shoved above or below? duplicate letters being fused? pure chaos?!!) as I dutifully flogged through. Along the way, of course, I felt irritated by what I perceived as “bad clues” to some vertical entries (items in Ace are HARD? a near tie is DEAD? a final effort is a GASP? Ok, sure, maybe in some looser idiomatic sense, but come on!). It was only when I decided to actually enter my dropped letters in rebus form (for bookkeeping) that I realized how the two intersected, and sped through all the theme answers. But second, I just feel like this Sunday had properly challenging clues in a way that I haven’t seen in some time. That whole section around WAPITI crossing PALISADE sent me on so many false starts, as did the section around BRANCA crossing METRO and SIERRA. Felt so gratifying when I cracked em!

Challenging but rewarding. For the first ~20 minutes I had very little I was certain of, and was steeling myself for a handful of unsatisfying answers I and other commenters could stew over later. But as I worked through it, everything fell into place elegantly. For my money there isn’t a single clumsy clue or answer here, which is hard to accomplish with such an (initially) challenging solve. Well done!

I’ve been writing and recording film reviews for some 17 years, and I’ve never come across the phrase “Op-Doc”. Doesn’t mean it’s not a thing! Just means it’s never too late to learn something new.

Just so someone knows they’re not alone: I had a very difficult time with this solve! It was wonderfully constructed, but a few spots just had intersections of multiple things I’d never heard of—luck of the draw, I guess! (Still finished, but I admit I did peek at Chopin’s nationality on Google to break open the west block)

Solved this (delightful) puzzle, then sat for a minute wondering why I’d never heard the idiom “WRITE FOURTH ABOUT” before the truth dawned on me. I’m sports savvy, I swear!

I had fun solving this! I admit the paraphrasing of the poem made it pretty tough, but that made the recognition (eg seeing the option to end on “GIDDY UP”) more exciting when it finally clicked.

By pure coincidence, I solved this while watching COCKTAIL (the referenced Tom Cruise movie that features Kokomo) for the very first time. Probably cut my solving time in half, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

Laughed out loud when I figured out the theme (having already gotten SWEET____, WHEN IM _____, and CLOUD _____ and puzzled over what sort of rebus hell I was walking into). Well done!

Long solve, but enjoyable from start to finish! I’m glad the rebus squares weren’t clued with a circle or anything like that: Knowing a double letter would exist somewhere, but not knowing where it would be, was a fun wrinkle!

Had to button mash for the crossing of SNEAD and TOSCANINI (I know people abuse the term “natick” but this fits the bill perfectly, doesn’t it?), and struggled in general with some of the headlines whose verbiage I didn’t know even if I inferred the event. Pretty brutal Sunday for me. But mostly a very fun kind of a brutal!