NYT’s Cleverest Puzzles to Celebrate April Fools’ Day

The New York Times puzzles feature takes a thorough look at several published crossword puzzles. If you choose to answer ahead of time, you can complete it through the links below. For a limited time, they will be free to play.

It was 1998, and Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times Crossword puzzle, wished to try out something new. His predecessors had started April Fools’ Day in their puzzles for years. Margaret Farrar, The Times’s original crossword editor, allowed the holiday its first overt nod in 1962, with a simple Sunday titled “Famous Fooleries.” It comprises entries like THE CARDIFF GIANT, which is a renowned hoax.

In 1969, Farrar’s successor, Will Weng, called a true “trick” less than three months into his own editorship: The grid possesses apostrophes, as with DON’T five letters crossing ENTR’ACTE having the nine letters.

Mr Shortz’s first true trap spanned multiple days: March 31 and April 1, 1998. Both the puzzles were made by Alan Arbesfeld, which was odd as Mr. Shortz rarely published similar bylines constantly.

Each puzzle contains theme clues with similar geometric shapes that are a diamond, a square, a circle and a triangle. It is about to make them visually characteristic. They used the exact same pattern of black squares, and started with the precise same across clues:

1-Across: [Check]

5-Across: [Fill to excess]

9-Across: [Country bumpkin]

At a glance, in other words, the April 1 puzzle appeared to be a precise repeat of the March 31 puzzle. Meanwhile, the answers to the theme clues were, in fact, distinctive.

Mr Shortz said, “My phone at The Times rang all day with solvers calling in to say that I’d mistakenly repeated the previous day’s puzzle”. Well, it was my pleasure to say, ‘Ha-ha! April fool!’.