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Nytimes mini crossword starbucks6/23/2023 ![]() You can have up to 100 people on your leaderboard, in addition to yourself. Leaderboards are personal, so the only people you will see on your leaderboard are those you invite to join and confirm to add. Solve time is calculated the first time that you solve a puzzle. You can only view the leaderboard for the current live Mini puzzle. When a new puzzle arrives each day, the leaderboard automatically resets to reflect the new puzzle. You and your friends who play the Mini Crossword can add each other to your leaderboards to keep track of how long it takes for everyone to complete each day’s puzzle. It was a bit too much of a random listing - and PUGET SOUND wouldn't be in my top ten of things to include, and STARBUCKS felt like a big omission (the local joke is that you can throw a rock 50 feet in any direction and hit a Starbucks) - but such a nice touch of SPACE NEEDLE intersecting so perfectly with SEATTLE.Leaderboards is a feature available for the Mini Crossword on the New York Times Games site for Desktop and the Mobile app. The latter is more workmanlike, but I love the unMondayish clue, using wordplay around liberalism.Īll in all, this Seattleite enjoyed the hometown love. What fun bonuses in PERMIT ME and KEEP LEFT. Some ELKE, TAI, IST, but that's a lot less than I would have expected given all the SPACE NEEDLE letters fixed into place, as well as all the themers. ![]() ![]() I'd personally have sent the puzzle back for revision, accepting two or three dabs of crossword glue in its place if necessary. I'd go far, far, far out of my way to avoid this word in a grid. Great work down there, so smooth, along with the bonuses of RAT RACE and TITANTIC, with just a RIATA as a price to pay. Speaking of those circled letters, it's so tough to work around fixed letters, especially when you jam them into a space that's as big as the south section. Nice bonus in the SPACE NEEDLE visual, and what an elegant touch to have SPACE NEEDLE start and end at the start and end of SEATTLE! The visual doesn't quite have the right dimensions (see right), but it would be difficult to make it any more accurate unless you added several more circles to better define the shape. Shout out to the 2-0-6! (SEATTLE's area code.) PIKE PLACE MARKET is a fun place to hang out - there's a piroshki place I love, and don't get me started on the fresh mini-donuts - and indeed, we do have eleventy-billion COFFEE SHOPs here. After all, what puzzle about Seattle is complete without mentioning its signature weather? I initially worried that I wouldn't be able to balance RAIN with another theme entry, but fortunately, PIER came to the rescue.Īll in all, I had a lot of fun constructing this one, and I hope Seattleites appreciate the shoutout! And who knows, I just might be back with more early-week offerings :). In fact, I was all set to send a version of the puzzle with RuIN/YuLE in the upper left corner when I noticed I could change RuIN to RAIN. Noticing that the reveal SEATTLE would fit right between the S and the last E of SPACE NEEDLE was a huge stroke of luck, and I quickly banged out the rest of the grid from there. Once I realized that PIKE PLACE MARKET was 15-letters long, I was off and rolling. Luckily, SPACE NEEDLE was the perfect length to make a grid art design out of, though it took me a few tries to come up with a convincing enough Space Needle. I knew pretty early on that I wanted the focus of the puzzle to be the Space Needle grid art. So I thought it would be fitting to pay homage to my "crossword roots." In between long stretches of living in California, I lived in the Seattle area for four years, which is where I first started constructing crosswords (for a fifth-grade project-see photo!). ![]() One of the first things that came to mind for some reason was Seattle. So the next time I sat down to construct something, I decided to target Monday instead of Friday/Saturday. But I also noticed he was short on Mondays, which interested me because I'd never given much thought to constructing early-week puzzles. I saw that he was shortest on Sundays and Thursdays, which was no surprise because those are the hardest ones for me to come up with. I constructed this puzzle a few months ago after reading one of Will Shortz's Cruciverb announcements about his inventory. ![]()
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