In case you missed Friday’s NYT Mini Crossword puzzle, you can find the answers here:
October is here, and I’m back, baby! It’s been two weeks since I’ve been your Mini Crossword host, and now I take the baton from my colleague Paul Tassi. I’ll pass it to my colleague Kris Holt in a week, but for now you’re stuck with me, bwahahaha! It’s the weekend, which means the toughest Mini Crossword of the week is this one. Get ready to solve some trickier than usual words.
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.
One good tactic with crossword puzzles is to try to get as many ACROSS as possible first and then you’ll find a lot of the DOWN are already done—or vice versa if the ones ACROSS are trickier.
While some of today’s words are pretty simple, some might have you stumped. You’ll find the answers below. Spoilers ahead, obviously. Skip ahead for the image of today’s solved puzzle.
ACROSS
1 — Lego piece — BRICK
6 — Company whose name is spelled with up to 10 O’s toward the bottom of its webpages — GOOGLE
7 — Inventor of the first commercially available electronic instrument, a synthesizer — BOBMOOG
8 — Largest country without an official language — USA
9 — Some smart devices — TVS
10 — Muscular dog with black and tan fur, familiarly
12 — Precipitates freezing rain — SLEETS
13 — Warty hopper — TOAD
DOWN
1 — Milky drink with ‘pearls’ — BOBATEA
2 — CD- — ROM
3 — “Aha!” — IGOTIT
4 — Pumpkin spice ingredient — CLOVES
6 — Break off from the rest of the band — GOSOLO
7 — Go “pop” — BURST
11 — Bill’s time-traveling partner of film — TED
This was a bit tricky but I think it helped enormously that BRICK was the right word for 1-Across. Having that made a lot of the Down words pretty easy, or at least helped me confirm that they were right. I thought SLEETS was a bit odd, and IGOTIT I had to fill in with other words. My big mistake at the end was using Rob instead of Bob for BOBMOOG, but when I saw 7-Down was RURST I figured it out pretty quickly. This took me a whopping 3:14 today, which isn’t great but oh well! 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!
