Crossword Fans Are Mad the New York Times Is Locking Down Its Puzzles

On Monday The New York Times announced its popular crossword puzzles will no longer support the .puz file format. Many third party apps, including Across Lite and Red Sweater Black Ink 2, use the .puz format and this change from the Times effectively means its cutting off third party app support for the crossword puzzle.

The Times will officially drop support on August 10. After that, crossword fanatics will have to use the paper’s proprietary app or download a PDF. Some aren’t happy with the change. Crossword champion Dan Feyer, who The New York Times once described as “the crossword wizard who is fastest of all,” expressed his displeasure in a long Twitter thread.

“This change benefits NONE of the millions of online solvers who pay an annual subscription for access to the crosswords,” Feyer said. “It is a pure cash grab, removing the convenience that has been part of digital crosswords since the mid-’90s. Taking away .puz files serves two purposes only: making the job easier for the editorial team, and forcing online solvers to use the mobile crossword app or the NYT website, where they can sell ads and/or collect user data. Cash grab.”

The New York Times crossword is so popular that it has its own subscription tiers separate from the newspaper. For $25 a month or $40 a year, fans can access all the digital puzzles they can handle. The .puz format has been around since the mid 1990s and has become one of the standards for digital crossword puzzles, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s just what people have been using for more than 30 years. The New York Times offered it as a free download for subscribers so they could use whatever app they wanted to solve the puzzle. 

Everdeen Mason, the Times’ new Games editorial director, is behind the decision and she responded to Feyer on Twitter, justifying the call. 

“I’m trying to build something where the editors can actually edit and make games rather than adapt things for tools we can’t control. It takes a lot of time, and I’m confident this is the best move for my team,” Mason said on Twitter. “My team is small and extremely good at what they do, and part of my job is to overhaul things so their lives are easier. We also need to adapt to future technologies and build a foundation we can make more things on.”

A spokesperson for The New York Times echoed Mason. “This change was made by editors to improve the editorial process. Our crossword puzzles can still be solved online or in the app, as well as downloaded or printed,” they told Motherboard in an email. “The New York Times Crossword means a lot to our community of solvers and we value their feedback.”

Industrious puzzle fans who want to keep using the .puz format have already found simple solutions. “I actually have a script that can turn a NY Times crossword webpage into a .puz file,” nobody514, a member of the /r/crossword subreddit, said in a thread about the changes at the Times. “If there's some demand, I can look into making it work for people that aren't me, and put it up somewhere.” The user posted the code to a GitHub so anyone with a little knowledge of Python can use it.

nobody514 told Motherboard that they’re upset about the changes to the puzzle. “I've been solving crossword puzzles for something like 30 years,” theys said. “I don't welcome the NYTimes’ clear goal of ‘controlling the experience’ more and more.”

They said that their script proves making a .puz file is easy and fast and also pointed out that it’s one of the only ways to solve a puzzle offline without printing out a PDF. “Across Lite is creaky in how it works, but it works offline, and it's my daily ritual to solve puzzles offline in a coffee shop or (weather permitting) a local park,” they said. “There are too many distractions online, so I keep my wifi off. Not to mention their stupid website insists on showing animated ads and images on the crosswords puzzle page.”

nobody514 said they plan to update the script so anyone can use it without knowledge of Python. Another user in the thread said they built a Chrome extension that scrapes puzzles from webpages and converts them into whatever format the user wants. “The big caveat here is that there's a clear trend towards the NYT doing more and more innovative/different things with their puzzles, and especially without the constraints of having to also post a .puz file, I'd expect that to continue,” the redditor said.