Author: plusjeremy

70 minutes. A puzzle like this, I feel compelled to finish no matter how long it takes — and, well, this one took some time. I fell asleep slightly in the middle, but I don’t think staying awake would have made the puzzle go any quicker.

37:29. I was concerned about solving a Friday puzzle after an early morning and long day of plane travel, but I’m quite pleased with this time for what seems to be a difficult puzzle.

33:09, indicating middle-of-the-road difficulty (by normal Friday standards!). I thought this puzzle was just great. Wonderful word choices, lovely definitions which were misleading without being hopelessly vexing. I can stand harder, but I was quite happy with this.

66:52. At 41 minutes I texted vinyl, “Three left.” At 64 minutes I texted him, “Two left.” I’m good at getting stuck at the end of puzzles.

30 minutes, more or less. I solved this puzzle on the regular Times site (not the Crossword Club), so it wouldn’t accept my puzzle as correct. After checking every answer I finally used the Check Puzzle feature and discovered my “mistake”.

All this aside, I thought this was a delightful puzzle. Some fabulous definitions.

53:32. The first word of 1 across was, perhaps, a portent of things to come.

1:15:23, a gargantuan time for a very difficult puzzle, which was nevertheless very enjoyable to solve. Really the time was just about one hour, but the last 15 minutes were spent on a single clue.

Probably this puzzle hails from you-know-who. I’m getting used to his style. I was able to spot his wordplay immediately, nearly every time, but I wasn’t able to find the right synonyms.

25:51. It would appear I might have done well on a hard one. I felt like I caught onto the setter’s tricks fairly early, but the last few were tough-going indeed.

23:06, and early SNITCH statistics suggest this is of average difficulty only. Since I don’t get to do many puzzles these days, I was glad to get through one!

DNF! This was very difficult. I have a mild case of COVID, which did mean I fell asleep for a few minutes while solving, but that’s hardly an excuse. I managed maybe half of the puzzle, but was thoroughly defeated here.