Okay, let me tell you about this little binge I went on with the NYT Mini crossword.
Getting Started with the Minis
So, the other day, I found myself with some unexpected downtime. You know how it goes, waiting around. I usually knock out the daily NYT Mini pretty quick, like five minutes tops most days. But this time, I thought, why not just… keep going? The app has that archive, right? So I decided to just dive in and do a whole bunch of them back-to-back. Felt like a challenge, sort of a mental workout.
I just opened up the app, finished the day’s puzzle, and then hit that archive button. Started scrolling back, day by day. Didn’t really have a goal, just wanted to see how many I could do before I got bored or my brain turned to mush.
The Process – Going Down the Rabbit Hole
It started easy enough. The first few archived ones, maybe from the past week, felt familiar. Similar clues, similar difficulty. I was just tapping away, filling in the squares. Pretty satisfying, actually.
Here’s kinda how it went:
- Finished one puzzle.
- Felt that little dopamine hit.
- Immediately clicked ‘Play Archive Puzzle’.
- Solved the next one.
- Repeat. A lot.
After maybe ten or fifteen puzzles, I started noticing things. You see the same short words pop up quite a bit. EKE, OREO, AREA, ELI, ONO. It’s like a little vocabulary list you build up just by doing these things. It definitely made solving faster as I went along.
But then it got interesting. Some older puzzles felt a bit different. Maybe slightly tougher clues, or words that aren’t as common now. Or maybe my brain was just getting tired. I definitely hit a few snags where I had to stare at a clue for longer than I wanted to. Sometimes I’d put the phone down for a second, look away, and then the answer would just pop into my head. Funny how that works.
What I Realized
Doing so many Minis in one go was… well, it was plentiful! It wasn’t exactly hard in the way a big Saturday puzzle is hard, but it was a test of endurance. It showed me how much pattern recognition plays a part. You start anticipating the kind of fill they use for 3-letter or 4-letter answers.
It also made me appreciate the cleverness of the daily puzzle more. When you just do one, it’s a quick, sharp little burst of fun. When you do a ton, you see the craft, but also the constraints they work under. Trying to make something fresh every single day with such a small grid is tough.
Honestly, after about an hour or so, they started to blur together a bit. But it was a fun way to kill time, and I definitely felt like I’d given my brain a specific kind of workout. Would I do it again? Maybe not quite as many in one sitting, but yeah, diving into the archive once in a while is pretty cool.
