If you play or follow sports, there's a seasonal rhythm that you accept without questioning: off-season, exhibition games, regular season, playoffs, championship. In NYT crosswords, that slow annual cycle is replaced with a weekly whiplash. Monday is a warm up, Tuesday through Thursday separates the high flyers from the just-wait-until-next-years. Friday and Saturday are playoffs and championships, I suppose, although I'm not sure what to make of Sunday. The off-season marathon?
This rhythm method of graduated difficulty serves an obvious purpose. It provides something for everyone. If you're a regular NYT solver you just accept this and even look forward to it. Surprisingly, perhaps, even as I anticipate the weekend, the early week breezes are still fun, and I can make them even more fun by making them harder.
Do you add extra challenges to the easy crosswords? I used to time myself on Mondays until I discovered how slow I was compared to the pros so that's not as much fun anymore. Yeah, I know I should compete against myself and try to better my own times, blah, blah, blah. Instead, I now do other tricks to make Mondays more challenging. Here's the recipe for my favorite which I call Enforced Letter Order:
- Grab a pen. You're going to do this on paper with ink.
- Fill the letters in order, left to right on the top row, then left to right on subsequent rows until the end.
Do you see what happens? You have to fill in 1 Across first, left to right. If you're not sure because there are multiple possible answers, you look at the Down clues and figure them out, without writing them in. Maybe there are still multiple possibilities so you have to keep looking at various Down and Across clues, keeping it all in your head, until you're sure of 1 Across and then you firmly pen that in. Next, you go onto the second Across clue, and so on. If you're stuck, you can't jump over to an easy clue later on. No skipping ahead. You work out the answer in your head before you go on. The extra-pro version would be to solve the whole thing in your head before you write a single letter, but my ELO idea seems far more sane to me.
Here's an even better suggestion for what to do with an easy Monday puzzle. Find a friend who loves words but isn't hooked on crosswords yet. Sit down with her or him and work it out together. Today's Monday puzzle by Christina Houlihan Kelly (answers) with its theme of punny impediments would make a great introduction to our sport.
