NEW YORK, Jan. 15, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Wall Street Journal is expanding its regular weekend line-up of crosswords and puzzles and will now feature cryptic, acrostic and novelty offerings with the debut of The Saturday Puzzle in tomorrow’s Weekend Edition.

“The Journal is already home to an outstanding Friday crossword, and readers will no doubt relish our new Saturday line-up of adventurous and addictive puzzles,” said Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones & Company and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. “Our aim is to amuse and bemuse intelligent people.”

Following the regular Friday Puzzle in Weekend Journal, The Saturday Puzzle rotation will feature:

* Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, creators of the Atlantic’s Puzzler,
will contribute a cryptic crossword every four weeks. Readers
who are new to cryptics, which rely on cleverness and wordplay,
can consult a guide to solvers on WSJ.com;

* Patrick Berry, author of the “Puzzle Masterpieces” collection,
and Mike Shenk, the Journal’s crossword editor, will offer a
novelty word puzzle every two weeks that explodes the usual
across-and-down grid and replaces it with snakes, snowflakes,
honeycombs, and other mind-bending shapes;

* Mr. Shenk also offers an acrostic every four weeks, in which a
solver fills in answers to clues and transfers the letters to
a grid that spells out a secret quotation.

Anyway, here are the new links for 2010. And thanks for your gentle reminders and your patience.

• New York Times (requires premium membership, includes daily and Sunday puzzles)
• Los Angeles Times (requires free membership at Cruciverb.com, includes daily puzzle too)
• Boston Globe
• Philadelphia Inquirer
• Wall Street Journal (Friday)

And once again, thanks to Will Johnston, Lloyd Mazer and Kevin McCann for their efforts putting this together. I simply post links to their work. They’re the ones who deserve our thanks as we enjoy the puzzles online.

Anyway, there has been a change in the puzzle line-up on weekends, with the Washington Post running Merl Reagle’s puzzles (same as the Philadelphia Inquirer). As a result, I’m not including the Washington Post on my list, since it’s the same puzzle as run in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

For those of you who like the links all in one place, here they are:

• New York Times (requires premium membership, includes daily and Sunday puzzles)
• Los Angeles Times (requires free membership at Cruciverb.com, includes daily puzzle too)
• Boston Globe
• Philadelphia Inquirer
• Wall Street Journal (Friday)

Thanks again to Will Johnston, who maintains the calendars at his website, and to Lloyd Mazer who “Litzes” the Wall Street Journal puzzles and maintains them on his website. (Hope I havent forgotten anyone.)

Enjoy! I’ll try to be a little more active on the blog this year.

Anyway, here are the links for 2008. Enjoy!

The Wall Street Journal 
The Washington Post
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Boston Globe
The New York Times

Remember, you need AcrossLite in order to open and solve the puzzles at these sites. You can still go to the Cruciverb site to access the Los Angeles Times puzzle.

The Wall Street Journal 
The Washington Post
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Boston Globe
The New York Times

Remember, you need AcrossLite in order to open and solve the puzzles at these linked sites, so download and install that first. Also note that I did not include the Los Angeles Times puzzle because you have to first log-on at the Cruciverb website to access that puzzle.

Last Saturday I participated in the Westport Library’s annual crossword puzzle tournament. (See prior post on this subject.) It was most enjoyable. But the puzzles used in the tournament were this week’s Monday through Thursday puzzles from the New York Times. So each day this week I was deprived of solving a fresh puzzle as I went through my morning routine with the Times.

I didn’t think I’d miss the puzzle that much. After all, I still have 3 or 4 other puzzles I can solve online, and it’s a chance to actually spend more time on articles in other sections of the newspaper that I enjoy. All that’s fine, but now I realize now how truly addicted I am to that ink-on-paper puzzle near the back of the Arts section of each day’s New York Times.

I wonder if Will Shortz realizes that he’s not so different from the pushers who prey on drug users in our neighborhoods. He simply makes puzzles available for people who enjoy the mental challenge, but in the process he feeds a habit that’s hard for many of us to break. And perhaps he’s complicit in encouraging our addictive behavior.

My pen and coffee cup are ready for the Friday puzzle, so I can resume my former morning routine — including the crossword puzzle in the [hardcopy] New York Times.

Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, provided the puzzles and was there to entertain, amuse, and challenge the participants, and to share the puzzles that are used in the on-air challenge for the following day’s Weekend Edition Sunday program on NPR. (The segment is taped on Thursday, so there’s no chance of sharing the answers with the person answering the questions on the program.)

The tournament got me thinking about how rare it is that crossword junkies get to see others like them in large numbers (like more than 3 or 4 at a time). Solving crossword puzzles is, after all, a solitary activity. It’s a rare occasion when you can find dozens of people all solving the same puzzle at the same time.

Perhaps that’s one of the things that makes tournaments so interesting for the participants: the opportunity to validate their otherwise solo/private passion with others who really understand what it’s like to enjoy a silent and focused non-work activity.

The folks at my table all noted that their significant others do not share their love of crosswords, and that’s a common observation. It’s unusual when two people in the same household both solve the same daily crossword puzzle. It would require some planned logistics, at a minimum.

Anyway, the tournament was great fun — a teriffic way to spend a Saturday afternoon once a year, and good practice for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament coming up in March.

But I’ve also noticed that there is a level of appreciation and enjoyment in solving a puzzle if you “know” the constructor and/or the editor. The process of filling in the squares with letters becomes more like a conversation with a familar friend. You start to know who uses a lot of puns, or who gives a lot of misdirection (i.e., “tricky clues,” usually with a question mark after them), or who is into trivia, music or pop culture, etc.

I’ve even developed a short list of “favorite constructors” who represent an extra incentive to attack the puzzle when their names are at the bottom.

If you haven’t paused to notice the constructor and the editor of the puzzles you solve, let me suggest you start making a mental note. After a while you’ll probably find, as I have, that you begin to recognize their individual syles — much as you would with a favorite author, singer, or composer — and enjoy crossword puzzles even more than you do now.

What could be novel in a crossword puzzle, you ask? Aren’t puzzles just a series of interlocking words and phrases?

Well, Patrick Merrill, an accomplished and very creative constructor, has brought yet another form of crossword novelty to the party in his Sunday-sized puzzle for the Scientific American magazine. It’s in the December issue, or you can link to it here and download the PDFs (two of them, one for the grid and one for the clues).

While it helps if you’re a regular reader of the magazine and know the year’s top science stories, the puzzle isn’t so difficult that everyone can’t enjoy it. Just click on the “Set Theory” graphic link, download the puzzle, and you’ll see what I mean.

There are probably four dimensions on which you can judge a puzzle — and together they determine how much enjoyment and satisfaction they will provide.

1. First, there is the theme. If it’s clever, engaging, perhaps surprising, and novel, you’ll experience the satisfaction that comes with the “Aha!” experience of realization or discovery.
2. Then there’s the fill – the words that fit into the grid. If they’re the same old words, with the same “crossword-ese” flavor, you probably won’t enjoy the puzzle. But if they are fresh and show unusual connection with the common usage of our language, you’ll probably appreciate the time you spend interacting with the puzzle (and indirectly with the constructor and editor).
3. Third is cluing. The clues are what make a puzzle more or less difficult, and also more or less enjoyable. If there are a lot of clues ending with question marks (indicating misdirection) or referring to subjects with which you are less familiar, you’ll find that you get a different kind of enjoyment than if the clues are all “straight” and familiar.
4. Finally, there’s the difficulty of the puzzle. If it’s too easy it isn’t much of a challenge, and it’s probably not going to be very enjoyable. And if it’s too difficult, you get frustrated and feel you need to “cheat” by looking up some words in a dictionary or online reference. That’s not very satisfying. So the difficulty has to be “just right” — the Goldilocks phenomenon.

The reason the really good puzzles are, well, really good is that the editors are keenly aware of these four dimensions and tweak them carefully to suit their audiences. A good editor is perhaps as important to a crossword’s final character as the constructor — and he or she is what separates the really good puzzles from the mediocre or poor ones.