How our puzzle editors balance difficulty
How do games like Strands and Connections balance difficulty change across puzzles? Does the difficulty change at all from day to day or through the week? When is a puzzle deemed “too easy” or “too hard” to be published? From Christina: Unlike the crossword, which gets progressively harder throughout the week, our other puzzles vary in difficulty a little more randomly. Tracy Bennett, a puzzle editor, says that, when it comes to Strands, she would never want to have two especially tough puzzles back-to-back. Each week’s worth of puzzles should have a variety of theme types and difficulty levels, and average out to roughly the same difficulty level. Since different people find different theme types more or less challenging, she tries to vary the type of theme as well. The “flow” of puzzles should feel friendly, so if a solver finds one puzzle unapproachable, the next day’s puzzle will be sufficiently different. Connections and Spelling Bee are similar. All our puzzles are edited and tested in batches of seven, and a batch of puzzles should feel fair and balanced. With Spelling Bee, Sam Ezersky, who edits the game, would be unlikely to run more than one puzzle in a week with a Z, for instance, or more than one pangram that is an especially tough vocabulary word. Similarly, since the number of words solvers need to find varies by puzzle, he would try not to have two puzzles in a row in which you need to find an unusually high number of words to make it to Genius. While this isn’t always the case, he tends to put puzzles with a high word count on weekends and holidays when people might have more time to solve at a leisurely pace. All our puzzles are tested by a panel, and most of the puzzles are ranked based on how challenging they are. Editors might shuffle some puzzles around based on the feedback from our testers, or even pull a puzzle that is flagged as too difficult. If a couple of testers flag a puzzle as too difficult to solve, we’d likely still run it, but if a majority of our testers found it difficult, we’d consider not running the puzzle, or seeing if their feedback could be addressed. In Strands or Connections, it might be possible to change one word on the board to make the game a lot easier.
Solve Friday’s Crossword on Easy Mode!
In today’s Wordplay column, Deb Amlen writes about the challenges of crossword construction. For expert hints on today’s puzzle, read her column here. Were you able to solve the Friday puzzle with Easy Mode? We want your input! Share your experience with us on the X platform, on Threads or by email. A Quick Cool-DownHow fast can you solve today’s Mini?
Get a ClueMy favorite clue from last week is 40-Across from Saturday, April 19. This is a bit of a classic, but still a good one! 40-Across: Lightly cut?
How are we doing? Thanks for playing! Subscribe to New York Times Games. If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can sign up to receive it regularly here. P.S. The answer to Get a Clue is LASE.
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