Happy Lunar New Year! [0:12/3:11] || Tue 2/1/22 New York Times Crossword

0:00 - Intro
1:26 - Mini puzzle
2:52 - Daily puzzle (by Zhouqin Burnikel)
6:03 - Commentary

New York Times Crossword, Tuesday 2/1/22
A very festive puzzle, and a really good learning experience for a Tuesday puzzle. SOLLAL, NOWRUZ, and SONGKRAN are quite hard, but they're all crossed fairly and sort of the point of the puzzle is to highlight various new year celebrations around the world. The grid structure here (in a 16x14 grid) made the fill seem a bit choppy, but made the crosses largely fair on the themers. Perhaps MERLE Haggard crossing SOLLAL at the last L is a bit tough.

Also perhaps a slight inelegance in having two of the holidays being the new year of the same calendar (SOLLAL and SPRINGFESTIVAL both being the start of the lunar year). Regardless, I think this is a good example of how to teach your solvers some interesting things, even on a Tuesday.

12s on the Mini and 3m11s on the daily puzzle. (Weekly running total: 5m51s)

Weekly PB: 36m35s

Thanks for liking, commenting, subscribing, and sharing the video!

▶ Daily puzzle (subscription required): https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/daily/2022/2/1
▶ Mini puzzle https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/mini/2022/2/1
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All music composed by my friend: composer, pianist, and all-around awesome guy Christopher Chan - https://christopherkchan.me/
Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/album/28yqysGINqOP70rMYV7opC
Video of crossword theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h8S6y3SyIk

Intro animation by Tiffany Peng, another incredibly talented friend. [I can highly recommend Chris and Tiff if you need any music composed for you!]
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