NYT Variety Mess

I’m often asked, what’s going on with the Acrostics and other Variety puzzles at the Times? Honest answer: I have no clue.

To catch you up, NYT used to provide digital versions of the weekly Variety puzzles on their website — both for solving and printing. That mysteriously stopped, and now there is no hint on the website that such puzzles ever existed. They still show up in the Sunday magazine, and probably smaller ones in your daily newspaper, but that’s it.

The latest news is that the weekly Wordplay Variety column by Caitlin Lovinger has been killed too. Not surprising, perhaps, since most of the comments were complaints about the puzzles not being available on their website.

Will the NYT drop Variety puzzles altogether? Again, no idea, but I have learned that while Variety solvers may be a small group compared to their crossword counterparts, they are passionate! People love them.

Variety puzzles on XWord Info

For now, these puzzles are available online only at XWord Info. That’s only possible because I get cooperation from the Times. If that cooperation continues, I’ll keep trying to do my part to make them available. This is not a simple task. Each week, I have to manually digitize them, a process both cumbersome and error prone. You need an XWord Info account to view or play them.

Rumors

Will the Variety puzzlers still come to play, even without a blog to share their passions? There’s a rumor going around that, at least for Acrostics, they may soon have a new choice.

There are many crossword blogs, but the big ones — Amy, Michael, even Jeff when he blogged, and now Wordplay — ignore Variety puzzles completely. It would be great if another blogger rose up to fill the gap. I hope the rumors turn out to be true.