I attempted every New York Times Crossword in 2025 with the goal of a 🌟Gold Star🌟 solve (no hints, same day solve, no internet) on each puzzle. The only outside help I accept is from my loving wife, Kayla, who has agreed to the Gold Star rules above.

I’ve been doing this crossword for years, but I’ve never made a prolonged effort to get better or to consistently attempt every puzzle.

See if you can guess the section titles along the way.


1. Across: Avg. bibs sales, and others? (12 letters)

Puzzles Attempted: 365

Gold Star Solves: 294

Gold Rate: 80.55%

Golds per Week: 5.64


2. Down: Free running? (9 letters)

Most Consecutive Golds: 72 puzzles in a row, ended by a Wednesday puzzle on 2025-09-16.

Overall I had 40 individual gold runs with an average length of 7.28 puzzles and a median length of 4.5 puzzles. Pretty indicative of golding Monday-Thursday most weeks with one long run to inflate the mean.

Breakdown of how runs ended:

EndedBy Count
Saturday 12
Sunday 10
Friday 7
Wednesday 6
Thursday 5

The weekend puzzles were big disruptors.


3. Across: Mean activity for a jogger? (14 letters)

I track 3 levels of solve outcomes:

● Gold solves - Same day solve with no hints

● Blue solves - Hints/checks used or next day solve

● No solve

Both blue and grey solves are counted as full failures for the purposes of calculating gold solve percentages, but blue solves indicate that a gold was usually a few missed letters away.

Rolling n-Day Gold Solve Percentages:

Each point represents my puzzle result for a given day.

Cumulative Gold Solve Percentage:

The long run helped boost my cumulative gold percentage in the summer.

4. Down: How many magazines got delivered this year? (7 letters)

The NYT does not purposely make crosswords easier or harder during specific times of the year.

Month Puzzles Golds Blues Greys
Jan 31 27 2 2
Feb 28 21 6 1
Mar 31 21 2 8
Apr 30 26 1 3
May 31 15 7 9
Jun 30 23 5 2
Jul 31 29 2 0
Aug 31 31 0 0
Sep 30 23 2 5
Oct 31 28 1 2
Nov 30 22 2 6
Dec 31 28 3 0


5. Across: Light stretch? (3 letters)

The NYT varies the difficulty of crosswords by the day of the week, with Monday being the easiest and Saturday being the hardest. Sunday puzzles are larger (a 21x21 grid compared to 15x15) and are meant to be approximately the difficulty of the Wednesday or Thursday, per the NYT (How to Play). The Friday and Saturday puzzles are the only days that do not feature a theme, which adds difficulty by removing a common thread through 4-5 long answers. The Thursday and Sunday puzzles are the only days that regularly feature rebus squares.

Day Puzzles Golds GoldPct
Sun 52 28 53.85
Mon 52 52 100.00
Tue 52 52 100.00
Wed 53 47 88.68
Thu 52 45 86.54
Fri 52 40 76.92
Sat 52 30 57.69

While many squares are blacked out in the final puzzle, the Sunday grid has 441 potential squares which is roughly double the 225 squares in a regular weekday puzzle. A gold solve on Sunday therefore requires roughly double the effort of a normal sized puzzle. If my solve rate on the Sunday is 53.85% and you assume that this is actually the effort of solving two smaller puzzles in a row, then estimate for the 15x15 difficulty comparison would be the day that has a gold rate closest to (53.85%)1/2 = 73.38%. For me, that is Friday (76.92%).

On the other hand, a Sunday isn’t really the independent effort of 2 smaller puzzles since the theme doesn’t “reset” halfway through the puzzle. Not fully understanding the theme leaves a lot of possibilities for missed letters on long answers.

It’s my opinion that the Sunday should be marketed as roughly the difficulty of a Thursday/Friday puzzle (harder clues but with a theme).

Rolling 16-Puzzle Gold Percentages by day of week:

For a particular day of the week, how does my solve rate change over time?

Monday/Tuesday plots omitted for being trivial.

Cumulative Gold Percentages by day of week:

How did my day-level solve percentages come to be?


6. Down: Pastime for in-utero photographers? (11 letters)

Overall performance in the first and second half of the year.

Half Puzzles Golds GoldPct Blues BluePct Greys GreyPct
First 181 133 73.48 23 12.71 25 13.81
Second 184 161 87.50 10 5.43 13 7.07


Change in performance for each day (2nd half % - 1st half %):

Day GoldPctDiff BluePctDiff GreyPctDiff
Sun +30.77 -7.69 -23.08
Mon 0 0 0
Tue 0 0 0
Wed +15.53 -15.53 0
Thu +19.23 -15.38 -3.84
Fri +15.39 -15.38 0
Sat +15.38 +3.85 -19.23

Practice makes progress.


Bonus: Hybrid, crucifix, and traverse, for example? (10 letters)


Copy/paste below to cheat:

  1. Across: OVERALLSTATS

  2. Down: STREAKING

  3. Across: RUNNINGAVERAGE

  4. Down: MONTHLY

  5. Across: DAY

  6. Down: DEVELOPMENT

Bonus: CROSSWORDS