In case you missed Thursday’s NYT Mini Crossword puzzle, you can find the answers here:
It’s Friday at last, and my final day writing NYT Mini Crossword guides for the time being. It’s been a helluva week, culminating in The Game Awards and some pretty great announcements Thursday night. But enough preamble, let’s solve this puzzle!
The NYT Mini is a smaller, quicker, more digestible, bite-sized version of the larger and more challenging NYT Crossword, and unlike its larger sibling, it’s free-to-play without a subscription to The New York Times. You can play it on the web or the app, though you’ll need the app to tackle the archive.
Answers to today’s Mini Crossword below . . . .
Spoilers ahead!
ACROSS
1 — Spread out, as one’s fingers — SPLAY
6 — Long cloud of smoke — PLUME
7 — Subway payments — FARES
8 — Kind of garden with a bonsai tree — ZEN
9 — “Might I ___ …” — ADD
DOWN
1 — Rating on a Hawaiian Tropic bottle, for short — SPF
2 — New York hotel featured in “Home Alone 2,” with “the” — PLAZA
3 — Enticed with bait — LURED
4 — Modify, as the Constitution — AMEND
5 — Reply to roughly 3.6% of Harvard applicants for the 2028 class — YES
Not a terribly hard Mini today, mostly because the early words were easy enough that most of the trickier later ones were filled in by the time I got there. I wasn’t sure SPLAY would be correct, but it was. PLUME and FARES came after. I wanted to say KOI garden, but it was ZEN. Once that was filled in, the rest of the dominoes fell. This one took me 1:10.
How did you do? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
If you also play Wordle, I write guides about that as well. You can find those and all my TV guides, reviews and much more here on my blog. Thanks for reading!
