If you like puzzles this will brighten your day.
Also experience the odd difficulty due to Americanisms, but can't really fault a puzzle coming from something called the New York Times for that. I do however think the puzzle setting for Connections is inferior to The Wall from Only Connect, where they got the idea from. If you haven't seen that yet it's definitely worth a watch (it gets harder as as a season progresses).
I cancelled my subscription a few years back due to the way NYT was covering the current administration. At the time, I believed they'd never offer a "puzzles only" subscription because then they'd lose a large part of their subs. But, I was wrong. And now they offer a puzzle-only subscription.
There's a great documentary about the Crossword with Will Shortz that came out about a decade ago that's interesting.
Spelling bee is also pretty consistent.
And if you didn't know this, Thursdays and Saturdays can have rebuses.
I've always thought that Will Shortz was one of the most powerful people at the NYT (slightly joking, but sorta not).
Wordle and strands together usually take less than 5m. The midi ranges from 3m30 (my best time) to ~12m (my worst).
Not done Letterbox, Pips and Tiles, but I figured that all their puzzles are at the same level of difficulty.
It's interesting, to me, that (from my reading of the paper, which was very quick) they they consider it hard/easy based on a sort of brute-force attempt to find all the answers.
There's 3x sizeof of crosswords
1. Large Standard New York Times one (subscriber only) 2. Mini (subscriber only) 3. Midi - which is in-between the large and the mini.
Once a week, the Midi is available to non-subcribers for free. A link comes in via email if you are signed up for their games.
It's a combination of 2D Wordle, crosswords and Sudoku. Been running for over 4 years :)
I made a simpler take on "challenging Wordle" some years ago: https://quuxplusone.github.io/wordle-clone/evirdle/ (Try "easy mode" too!)
It is not really meaningful to talk about the computational complexity of most problems exactly as they are published in NYT, or they end up trivially in P, since the problem description length is bounded by finite English letters, fixed board size, finite English dictionary etc.
Kudos to you. That would be insanely difficult. There is a lot of American-based pop culture, knowledge, and slang that makes it even difficult if you are a native, English American speaker.
To avoid spoilers, the word in rot13 is just as meaningful to me: Znyorp
Statistically, approximately zero people play Letter Boxed and Tiles.