Game of the Week: Crossword Puzzles

 

Being someone who's typically pretty good at guessing the correct Jeopardy! answers questions, along with possessing a generous amount of stored-up trivia and knowledge of the English language, I should be better at doing crossword puzzles than I am...but I'm usually relegated to doing the easy ones, such as with the above photo.  My parents were whizzes at them, however, and I remember being impressed by the very difficult diagramless puzzles they would do.  As for myself, unless it's a book that has "easy" in its title or a Monday or Tuesday newspaper puzzle (they get harder as the week progresses), I know my limitations and steer clear of the more challenging crosswords. It's not exactly my favorite kind of puzzle you work out on paper: I greatly prefer Kakuro, Jumble, Hidato, Cryptograms, and Sudoku.  Of course, with a smartphone and that handy-dandy Google search engine, I can fudge a little on the game and conveniently help myself if a clue isn't bringing to mind the correct combo of letters in the designated length of row or column.  I've tried the more difficult crossword puzzles from time to time, but there's one type I refuse to do: puzzles in which some letters can only be accessed from one clue...you absolutely must be able to work on any unknown space from both directions or it isn't a legitimate crossword puzzle!