The Puzzles:
Each volume of “A Month of Saturdays” Crosswords consists of 31 kinda hard crosswords collected from our Daily Puzzles.
An addictive crossword variant very similar to the classic Patrick Berry puzzle Rows Garden. Thirty-eight hexagrams are to be filled with six-letter words and phrases while the 20-character rows each get two longer entries. The clues are relatively straightforward, but these puzzles are inherently tricky.
You won’t find anything quite like these puzzles anywhere else. Standard Across entries intersect with snakelike entries of varying length that slither across the diagram. Kinda hard.
Like HexaCross, this puzzle has been borrowed from puzzle master Patrick Berry. Nine-letter words and phrases are arranged in 32 overlapping triangles. You have to determine the starting point and orientation of each entry.
Imagine taking a string of 24 words and phrases, and then reading them all backwards only to discover a whole different string of 24 words and phrases. Weird! Well, that’s exactly what happens in this puzzle.
Five different 60-character strands of words and phrases weave through each other in ways that can be both enchanting and dizzying. Try not to lose your place!
In these puzzles, 8-letter words and phrases are arranged in 25 overlapping diamonds.
These quirky 7x7 crosswords are more difficult than they might at first appear. In each entry, you might have to skip a square or two at any moment to make the alignment work out in the other direction. Work back and forth between the Across and Down clues.
Crosswords without those pesky black squares clogging up the works! They’ve been replaced by bold lines. This simple change opens up the diagrams in interesting ways.
Almost all Sudoku puzzles are reverse-engineered so that they can be solved by the standard logical procedures. We’ve taken a contrarian stance. These are made just so that those procedures will come up short most of the time. Something extra is generally required.
An interesting thing happens to Sudokus when you replace the standard 3x3 blocks with irregular, jagged shapes: You’re freed from the tyranny of the 9x9 diagram! Blows the mind! Our puzzles range from 7x7 to 10x10.
These are hard KenKen puzzles by a better name.