Every week, the NYT Sunday Magazine publishes a large crossword and one or more variety puzzles. Acrostics alternate weeks with cryptics and various other special puzzles.
There is some brilliant work here that I want to organize and surface for others to see. Many of the best clues have been in acrostics or other variety puzzles.
Acrostics are included back to mid-1999. Other puzzles similar to crosswords going back to 1997, including cryptic, diagramless, and panda (Puns and Anagram) puzzles, can be solved here online. More unusual variety puzzles like Split Decisions and Marching Bands can be downloaded as PDFs for you to print out and solve on paper.
Yes! See the Collaboration Mode FAQ. Collaboration mode is not supported for Acrostics.
Mostly yes. Finder searches can show Variety results separately.
In early 2023, the New York Times stopped supporting digital versions of all Variety puzzles. We're doing our part to keep this critical legacy alive by including all the Variety puzzles we have here. Many are hand-digitized just for this site.
You must be signed in with your XWord Info account to view or solve the Variety puzzles. As of now, any account level will do, although that requirement might increase in the future.
PDF-only puzzles must, of course, be printed out to solve. Acrostics and other puzzle types can be solved using our proprietary solver page. Note that, at least for now, our solver requires a mouse and keyboard, so phone solving is not supported, and progress is not saved between devices.
We also have a combined list of all Variety puzzles that can be solved here with your XWord Info account.
Yes.
At least the main Variety puzzles. There are other smaller puzzles like KenKen that we do not include.
Yeah, sorry about that.
Although we get early access to the puzzles, we are independent of the Times. XWord Info is an expensive site to run. New Variety puzzles are hand-digitized — a cumbersome manual process.
Of course! No questions asked.