NYT puzzle gripe
Nov. 6th, 2008 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuToday's NYT puzzle: good basic idea, but I didn't enjoy the execution. Too many hard crossings that I eventually got but didn't enjoy, and worse, it seemed to me that the theme was inconsistent.
Sometimes, the symbol represented its English spelling (rotTEN). Of those, only one spanned a word boundary (saleS EVENt).
Sometimes, the symbol represented itself (no one writes "mp-three players").
Of the two cases where symbols were adjacent, in one case they formed a two-digit number ("86 it") and in the other they were a "replace with English spelling, then take a two-digit number, then a one-digit number" -- so I must say that "worKING 24/7" was my least favorite of the theme entries.
So partly I was frustrated because I never felt that I could extrapolate from what I knew of the theme to help solve the empty circles, and partly I was frustrated because the non-thematic parts of the puzzle felt unnecessarily hard.
Am I being too picky?
Sometimes, the symbol represented its English spelling (rotTEN). Of those, only one spanned a word boundary (saleS EVENt).
Sometimes, the symbol represented itself (no one writes "mp-three players").
Of the two cases where symbols were adjacent, in one case they formed a two-digit number ("86 it") and in the other they were a "replace with English spelling, then take a two-digit number, then a one-digit number" -- so I must say that "worKING 24/7" was my least favorite of the theme entries.
So partly I was frustrated because I never felt that I could extrapolate from what I knew of the theme to help solve the empty circles, and partly I was frustrated because the non-thematic parts of the puzzle felt unnecessarily hard.
Am I being too picky?
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-06 09:57 pm (UTC)It wasn't fun - and that's pretty much what I expect from a puzzle. Fun
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-07 01:55 am (UTC)Yes, you're being too picky - once you got one of the face cards (QUEEN, most likely), it was clear that all 13 from 2 up to A would be in there. Getting all 13 in there, with a few multi-rebus-entry entries, isn't easy.