Puzzles & Games · Today's Puzzle
The Saturday Crossword
Edited by the games desk. Average solve time: 22 minutes, one iced coffee.
The Saturday crossword is, by tradition, a themeless — which is to say a puzzle in which the constructor has abandoned the pretense of a unifying gag and simply gone looking for interesting words. This week's grid, constructed by a first-time contributor from Delray Beach, includes CAFÉCONLECHE, MANGROVEROOT, and, at 43-across, an eight-letter answer that has caused, in the past two hours, three separate arguments among our test-solvers.
The clues, which were edited on a porch in St. Petersburg, are on the harder side of the week. Nine of them contain question marks. One of them contains a pun so bad that our editor tried, twice, to cut it, and was overruled, twice, by the constructor. The pun stayed. We regret nothing.
The puzzle is playable, in full, in the puzzles app. The average solve time in this morning's beta test was twenty-two minutes. The fastest was seven. The slowest was, at the time of publication, still ongoing. We wish that solver well.