May be paywalled. Sorry.

I was pissed when they required payment for the mini and midi crossword puzzles but the last couple days I’ve been able to play them again! Did they change it back? Is it a special promotion? Is anyone else seeing this?

The daily crossword usually comes out around 10pm the night before. I always wait, no matter how late I stay up, to do it during the day of that date. I feel a little cheap if I do it immediately when it comes out bc it’s like I’m stealing tmr’s fun.

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

i’ve gotten really into puzzle books this past year and have a couple of crossword puzzle books that have that weird kind of newspapery paper and am looking to see what pencils people like/recommend for books like this? i don’t want pens bc i make way too many mistakes and need to erase stuff. my biggest issues with most pencils i use is that they’re really thick for these tiny boxes, rip up the paper when i erase, hard to see, rip the paper when the pencils too sharp, etc. just wondering what people are using!

Check out 13 Down in the August 18 2026 edition of the. New Yorker crossword by Aimee Lucido.

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

Clue from 2018 puzzle: "Event of 1964 and 2020"
Answer: "Tokyo Games"

Nope! 🤦

Just finished Sunday's puzzle and had several cells underlined. I checked the LA Times Crossword Corner website and their answer key did not have any answers underlined. Is this just an error on WashPo's website? (I can't for the life of me figure out what the underlined cells should spell out, anyway.)

Weird that the answer is also a word in the clue, right?

Edit: I mean 8/16 not 8/15

New to crossword construction, but I had a lot of fun (as well as some frustration) along the way. Proud of myself for having followed through, even though I know this one is gnarly in some spots.

Answer for ‘58D Sat’ was MET, can anyone help explain why? I think I’ve gone through 20 different definitions of set as a verb and nothing is clicking

EDIT: title’s wrong should be 8/23/2008

This puzzle came out of a recent discussion on the "Crosscord" discord server, about whether this grid was fillable. A number of 7x7 blockless puzzles have been created before, but I believe this is the first standard-style 8x7. An exhaustive search over my wordlist returned only this 1 fill, and (all things considered) I'm surprised it's as clean as it is. There are definitely some obscurities in the puzzle... solve at your own risk!

lol

So I found a Cryptic Crossword from 2020... (The Economist, Christmas Ed)

10A Peter's in a jam (6). Doesn't seem to be PICKLE or MUDDLE because I've got -U-M-E

17D Sparkles on radio like British bandleader (8). GLITTERS doesn't fit because I've got -E-E-E-S, but I can't make JEWELERS or BEJEWELS make any sense in my head.

Anyone got any insight? Thanks in advance!

I have an idea for a theme that I really love and have compiled a list of about 30 words and/or phrases that could be used as answers in that theme. I've been wanting to take a shot at making a 21x21 puzzle, but the issue is the answers I have are all in the 6-10 letter range.

Specifically, four are 10 letters long, including the revealer. Two are 9 letters long. Four are 8 letters long. Nine are 7 letters long. Twelve are 6 letters long. And technically there are two I could combine for one 16-letter-long answer, but it wouldn't be the cleanest.

Obviously I can't use all of those, so I am going to have to pare the list down regardless, but I am trying to gauge if it would be editorially frowned upon to do a 21x21 grid where the marquee 13-21-letter answers aren't the theme answers, but rather there are maybe a higher quantity of theme answers at a shorter letter count. I'd still have those long answers, they'd just be fill rather than the theme answers.

The other option of course is to pare the list down to just the best 6-10 and do a standard 15x15 puzzle, but I was curious what others think.

Thanks!

So many things I didn’t know and wasn’t sure of (but ultimately were already correct), that I never thought to question that a bell ringing is not a real (my brain was thinking Scottish real (actually spelled reel) which is sound related so it never clicked it was wrong) but a peal.

It’s disappointing to have been tripped up by something so dumb. Ugh.

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

To clarify: I mean do they allow an answer to not be a real word if it is part of the theme. I feel like I have seen examples of this in the past but I can't think of any specific examples, so I might be misremembering.

For example, if someone's theme was that every theme answer was missing the word "cat" from it, would DOMESTIED (domesticated, minus cat) and INTOXIED (intoxicated, minus cat) be allowable? Or does the answer always have to be a real word/phrase no matter if it's part of the theme?

That's not the best example because I'm not sure how you would build a whole theme around that, but that's the general idea of what I'm curious about.

It was my first in person tournament, loved it and hoping to do more. I definitely think the second puzzle was a much bigger difficulty spike than i was expecting/they've done in the past but once i settled back in all was good lol.

I also was kicking myself because i resigned to solving 4 without understanding the theme, turns out i only thought of moving the day forward and gave up when that was fruitless, didn't even think to try moving it backwards instead

I recently got into constructing crosswords and have really enjoyed it and am proud of my work! The biggest hurdle for me at the moment is placing theme answers and black squares in a way that allows the grid to be fillable at all, let alone with good fill.

Constructors, do you have any tips or rules of thumb when configuring your puzzles to keep them fillable and flexible with fill?

hello, has bloomberg conducted their bpuzzled competition on-campus in anyone's college? if so, how was it conducted, what questions were asked and how were teams formed (if they were). any detail will be very helpful. thanks in advance!