New York Times puzzle games

[lpetrich]

The New York Times has a Games section: The Crossword- The New York Times with:

• A full-scale crossword puzzle
• A miniature crossword puzzle
• Wordle - find a word by guessing it and using clues supplied for each guess - a letter is either present in the right place, present elsewhere, or absent.
• Spelling Bee - find all words that contain any of 7 letters, where one letter must be present. Letters can be repeated.
• Letter Boxed - a square with three letters on each side, and one makes words by going from letter to letter. The last letter of each word becomes the first letter of the next word.
• Tiles - a grid with each cell having some overlapped artwork. Start at one and move to another one that shares an artwork, and repeat until one can no longer do that. At each step, the shared artworks are removed.
• Vertex - connect the dots to reveal some artwork. Each dot has a number of connections and as parts of the artwork are surrounded by correct connections, they are revealed.

I confess that I cheat. The NYT's full-scale crossword puzzles are hard for me to do without a *lot* of online searching for what might satisfy some of its clues. In the process, I found some sites that specialize in answers for crossword-puzzle clues. I sometimes do that with the minipuzzles, but I rarely have to do that.

I'm cheating in another way. I've written some word-game assistants as programs on my computer. I've written them in both Python/TK and Swift/Cocoa, and they both use a BSD-Unix dictionary file of words. The assistants work by finding all the words that satisfy the puzzles' constraints. Like for Spelling Bee, every word that contains only the seven letters that one enters, with one mandatory and the other six optional.

One can get a games subscription to do more of the puzzles, but I haven't thought it worth the money.

 

[lpetrich]

There is one more that I forgot to mention. Sudoku. In this puzzle, you place a number from 1 to 9 in each cell of a 9*9 grid. That grid is also divided into 3*3 blocks of 3*3 grid cells. Each cell's number must be unique in the row the cell is in, the column, and the block.

One starts with a grid that's partially filled in, and one tries to fill in the rest of the grid.

There are a variety of algorithms for solving Sudoku grids, and I myself have implemented a Sudoku solver: Sudoku | Internet Infidels Discussion Board

I've found that though NYT Sudoku grids come in "Easy", "Medium", and "Hard", even the hardest NYT ones can be solved with the algorithms that I have implemented in my solver: naked multiplets, hidden multiplets, and intersections. I've never found one that needs any fancier techniques.

 

[bilby]

I am not a fan of American crossword puzzles, as the clues don't provide the information about the structure of the correct answer, which is an inherent element in a British 'cryptic' crossword clue.

Cryptic clues contain not only a word or phrase that signifies the answer, but also hints about the answer as a word, such as anagrams, and/or letters or letter groups from within the word.

Cryptic crosswords for beginners: examples of examples | Crosswords | The Guardian

Continuing our series for those tempted or daunted by cryptics, we explore giving the answer by listing a specimen

amp.theguardian.com

The benefit of this style of clue is that while it can be infuriatingly difficult to solve one, having done so it should be very easy to confirm that your solution is correct - once you have the solution, fitting it to the clue is fairly easy.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Man... Spelling Bee got a lot easier when I realized you could use a letter twice!!!