Comment by kitd
13 days ago
I do Wordle, Pips, Strands, Connections & Sudoku. Of all of them, I find Connections definitely the hardest, even without the occasional US cultural references that I miss.
13 days ago
I do Wordle, Pips, Strands, Connections & Sudoku. Of all of them, I find Connections definitely the hardest, even without the occasional US cultural references that I miss.
Just Connections, Wordle, and Mini for me (in that order), with the occasional Crossword (tend towards a barbell strategy of just doing maybe Mon, Tue, Sun to get the quick hits and a real challenging puzzle).
Also experience the odd difficulty due to Americanisms, but can't really fault a puzzle coming from something called the New York Times for that. I do however think the puzzle setting for Connections is inferior to The Wall from Only Connect, where they got the idea from. If you haven't seen that yet it's definitely worth a watch (it gets harder as as a season progresses).
I think the hardest part of connections is that there are intentionally overlaps between most (if not all) of the categories. When my wife and I would do them daily, she would steadfastly refuse to make a single guess until she was fairly confident in the entire solution because in practice it was hard to be sure of the current four for a given category even with high confidence of what the category is. (I agreed with her but in practice have both less patience and more trouble figuring out certain categories, so I would often guess and either take a few misses before figuring it out or sometimes completely fail).
I still think the ultimate puzzle is the Sunday crossword (followed closely by Thur-Sat), though Connections is great. And definitely difficult (but never feels unfair).
I cancelled my subscription a few years back due to the way NYT was covering the current administration. At the time, I believed they'd never offer a "puzzles only" subscription because then they'd lose a large part of their subs. But, I was wrong. And now they offer a puzzle-only subscription.
There's a great documentary about the Crossword with Will Shortz that came out about a decade ago that's interesting.
Spelling bee is also pretty consistent.
I would say the Saturday puzzle is definitely harder. Sunday’s is just bigger.
100%. Every now and then they'll throw out a particularly tough Sunday, but I've yet to do a Saturday that wasn't difficult.
And if you didn't know this, Thursdays and Saturdays can have rebuses.
In 2023, 55% of visits to NYT's website were to games, not news. The puzzle-only subscription points to the NYT's fate as a game company that also offers news, much as airlines are credit card/loyalty point companies that also offer flights.
So my hunches were correct (majority of people were subbing to play the games), but not my conclusion: that they wouldn't split it off.
I've always thought that Will Shortz was one of the most powerful people at the NYT (slightly joking, but sorta not).
Connections are the only one that can't be solved by either a regexp grep against /usr/share/dict/words or an LLM query. I was actually surprised how poorly LLMs fared against it---I thought they'd be better at associating peripheral connections.