For a few terrifying years, it was just me (a feral joke writer with no coding experience), a bunch of puzzles that needed to be posted online and a lot of crying, so I am profoundly thankful for every single one of them. The Crosswords and Games team has grown to include approximately 40 very talented people: developers, game designers, art directors, quality assurance engineers, product managers, marketers, customer care representatives and social media strategists. The addition of the constructors Joel Fagliano and Sam Ezersky to the crossword editor Will Shortz’s team brought new perspectives to the puzzle entries and clues. We’ve seen new ideas on presenting puzzles online, including one that you had to print out and fold to assemble the revealer, as well as the magical celebrity crossword by Neil Patrick Harris and David Steinberg, in which, if you solved online, the revealer actually disappeared. In much the same way that the puzzles get harder as the week goes on, the New York Times Crossword picked up considerable steam over the years, culminating in a dizzying number of changes and additions over the past decade. The editors were skeptical they had no way of knowing at the time that this bit of frivolity, which has passed through the hands of only four crossword editors in 77 years, would become the stalwart gold standard of the puzzle making industry.īut again, that’s merely the starting point. The Times, whose editors had previously decried crossword puzzles as a “ primitive mental exercise,” made the decision to offer a Sunday puzzle to their readers as an escape from the unpleasant news of the war. They have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. While I couldn’t include everyone’s comments, I read them all and what was included in this column was representative of those responses. At the same time, I wanted to know if they felt their solving had changed. So I’ll do what I normally do here, with a twist: I’ll tell you a story - this one is about how the New York Times Crossword has changed over the past decade - but this time, a selection of Wordplay readers are going to tell the story with me.Ī couple of weeks ago, I asked readers to share their opinions on how the Crossword has changed. And since we solve together, it is only natural that we mark the end of the decade together (still rolling, right?). Duh.” Just roll with me on this.) It seems to me that this occasion needs to be marked in some way. Some of you are thinking, “The new decade doesn’t start until 2021, Deb. SPECIAL COLUMN - I don’t do annual retrospectives, but there is something heavy about moving from one decade to another.
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