Day: January 2, 2025

ACPT Registration is now open. The tournament falls on the same weekend as last year: April 4-6, in Stamford, Connecticut. Full information, including hotel block information, can be found at the event website.

Critically, if you are at all considering attending, we strongly recommend you make a hotel reservation and register for the tournament as soon as possible. Hotel reservations can be cancelled up to 72 hours prior to check in at no charge, and tournament fees are refunded if you have to back out or cancel.

Last year, the hotel block sold out in seven days and the tournament itself sold out by mid-February, with even the waitlist being capped shortly after. We can probably expect an additional hotel block at a nearby hotel, but why chance it?

We expect more details on the tournament and other weekend programming in coming weeks. 

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Speaking of that weekend, Puzzmo will once again be staging CrosswordCon in New York City the Friday (4 April) of ACPT weekend after its maiden event last year. Join the mailing list for further updates at the event website.

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Many thanks to those who donated to our year-end fundraiser. We were able to cover site costs, honor volunteer time, and set aside some funds to support other projects in the crossword community or grow DCL in the future. If you donated and have not received the fundraiser puzzle pack, please email us at crosswordlinks [at] gmail [dot] com.

We are grateful for your support at any time of the year, of course. While the year-end fundraiser pack is no longer available, if you donate now or in the future we will make sure to add you to the distribution list for our next fundraiser puzzle pack, tentatively in June. More information on how to support DCL here.

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The Puzzles for Palestine team has come together for a second edition of last year’s fundraising effort charity puzzle pack supporting humanitarian needs for Palestinians. The pack is available for preorder now, and will officially launch this month.

In addition to P4P, Writers Against the War in Gaza has published a dozen or so crosswords on their site in the last year. Deliberately agitprop, the puzzles are notable not just for their point of view, but in exploring the possibilities of what can be said and done in the art of a crossword puzzle.

Two new meta outlets hit our radar this week: Ariadne’s Crossword Library from Emma Oxford promises monthly reading- and literature-inspired meta crosswords by women and woman-aligned constructors.

Playbill Puzzles promises two monthly metapuzzles: one standard and one cryptic. The two will be linked, with the standard meta’s answer always a Tony-Award Winner for Best Musical, and the cryptic’s meta answer always a song from the previous puzzle’s Best Musical answer.

Both of these metas come from community members at the XWord Muggles Forum, an offshoot of the Wall Street Journal contest comments section that has grown the last few years into the go-to place for meta crossword discussion. A must-bookmark if you enjoy metas!

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Other additions to our list in the last month: Patrick Blindauer is now writing a daily puzzle for CNN, with plans to expand his team in the medium future || For silly reasons, we’d been missing weekly themed puzzles at Crosswordclub.com in addition to their daily midis || Dissonant Grids from Owen Bergstein promises some pretty challenging and engaging art, and the first puzzle lives up to that promise.

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In our last edition, we missed the Kickstarter for the next year of Peter Gordon’s Fireball Newsflash Crosswords. If you also missed the Kickstarter but are interested in the current-events minded puzzles, you can still subscribe here.

Two fun reads from the last month: A profile on Nate Cardin in Chemical & Engineering News, and the New York Times put together a roundtable of the Times’ Crossword staff reflecting on their favorite entries that debuted in the Times Crossword in 2024.

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Lastly, two crossword-adjacent packs: Brooke Husic, Will Nediger, and A24 released a puzzle zine inspired by the film Heretic, and the inimitable Patrick Berry dropped his latest variety meta suite, The Blabyrinth, featuring 10 puzzles of the sort you’d find in the Wall Street Journal Saturday rotation.

Cheers!