The New York Times has started up a new blog called Wordplay and it is, not surprisingly, a crossword puzzle themed blog.  I looked through some of the previous posts and most of them seem to be about the NYT crossword that day, with a few news items about Will Shortz sprinkled in.

You read that right.  Will Shortz and Merl Reagle will be guest starring in a crossword themed episode of The Simpsons this weekend.  In addition, the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle will be related to the show somehow.  Read more about it here.

There was a post on Passion for Puzzles recently about CrosScan puzzles.  CrosScan puzzles are billed as a combination of crossword puzzles and word search puzzle.  What this means is that the puzzle is essentially a word search puzzle but instead of a list of words, you are giving a list of clues to decipher.  You then need to find the word in the word search grid.

I have a couple thoughts on this puzzle type.  First, it may be harder than a crossoword because the answers to clues don’t really help you at all for the others.  The clues generally form a theme, but that’s about all you get.  You don’t get letter clues.  My second thought is that it seems like it’s possible to find the wrong answer.  I may get the wrong answer for the clue, but as long as I can find the right letters in the grid, I’ll never know it was a wrong answer.  I think there needs to be some kind of final answer, like a word made up of unused letters.  That could help solve the problem.

Here’s a quick news tidbit.  Next week, the New York Times will feature crossword puzzles constructed by students aged 15-19.

There’s an article in the Times Online about an art installation going in at the Stanmore Underground station in northwest London.  The installation is part of an Art On The Underground project that is sponsoring installations in a number of stations around London.  What’s interesting about the Stanmore station is that it focuses on crossword puzzles.

Serena Korda, the artist behind the installation, chose crossword puzzles as a theme because the Stanmore station is near where code breaking computer were housed during World War II.  Solving a Times crossword puzzle in less than 12 minutes was a requirement to join the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.  The installation was also inspired by information leaflets handed out in the underground during World War II.  These leaflets featured a crossword on the back.

Along with installation, there are a number of crossword puzzles themed around Stanmore.  The installation itself provides clues for the puzzles.  The installation is called The Answer Lies at the End of the Line.  And, apparently, this is also true for any who can’t solve the puzzles.

The blog The Most Beautiful Things has a post today about the most beautiful puzzle type.  The writer concludes that the most beautiful type is the variety cryptic crssword–a cryptic crossword with an interesting twist.  This is described as the “holy grail” of puzzle types.  There are a lot of great links in the post to variety cryptic crosswords which, as the post notes, can be hard to come by.

Black Ink is a nice little app that I stumbled upon for Mac users who love crosswords.  The basic idea is that it is a unified interface for a number of free crossword puzzles available on the internet.  Black Ink will download the puzzles automatically and save them so that you can play them all in one place.  There is a cost for this app ($24.95), but you can also download a free 30 day trial version.

Found through MacApper.

Here’s a great site for crossword lovers that I found.  Ephraim’s Crossword Puzzle Pointers is a very simple page that just provides links to puzzles recently published in major peridicals.

This is just a fun little blog post that I came across about solving crosswords collaboratively with Flickr.  It’s always interesting to see the various unintended ways that web technology can be used.

My Puzzle Fix is a puzzle blog that offers a daily puzzle for your enjoyment.  Of particular interest on this site are the “Double Meaning” crossword puzzles.  These are crossword puzzles where there are two clues for each word.  Additionally, the clues are grouped by across and down but, otherwise, they are given in completely random order.  So you don’t know, at the start, which clues go with which words.

The results are up for the 31st Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.  Tyler Hinman wins again.

Will Shortz has written a little blurb about the upcoming tournament for the New York Times.  It serves mostly as a reminder that the tournament is coming up and that it will be in Brooklyn this year.  It also mentions that there will be a screening of a film called “Wordploy,” a spoof of the 2006 documentary Wordplay.

There’s a story in the Yemen Observer about a Yemeni man who may have broken the record for the world’s largest crossword puzzle.  Abdul-Karim Qasem has created a crossword puzzle that has 320,500 squares and an 800,720 word clue book.  The puzzle took him seven years to complete and he needed to spend two days in bed after finishing it.

This story is an early favorite for strangest puzzle-related news article of the year.  (a category where there’s not much competition.)  Qasem claims that the previous record belonged to Tunisian man who had created a puzzle with 1800 squares.  This is not true.  The record setting puzzle that I know of has over 91,000 squares.  Still, Qasem’s puzzle shatters that record fairly handily.  Also, Qasem apparently used burn medication in his pens instead of ink when he was creating the puzzle.  I was unable to determine the reason from the article.

The new record has not yet been confirmed by Guiness.  Presumably when that happens, we’ll hear more about it from other international news sources.

I’ve come across another site for the crossword lover.  The site is BestCrosswords.com.  The site features daily puzzles that are either printable or playable through an online java applet.  It also features daily crosswords from guest constructors.  These puzzles tend to have a little bit more variety and are organized by popularity, difficulty, grid type (British or American), and clue type (straight or cryptic.)

The guest constructor puzzles are also playable in the java applet and really make the site worth visiting.  Currently, there are nearly a thousand of these puzzle available.  Enjoy!

Just Crosswords is another great site for crossword lovers.  It’s got about 300 free crossword puzzles on it grouped into variously themed categories.  The puzzles can be played on the site in your browser, using a web applet that’s pretty well done.  The down side is that most of the puzzle grids are not terrible dense, in that they have quite a lot of black spaces in them.  And, as with most free crossword puzzles, the difficulty level is not terribly high.