It was a mere minutes from the proverbial ball drop on New Year's Eve on Dec. 31, 2022, and my friend, who'd rented a beach house in Yachats for us all to celebrate the New Year, was pissed off.
"It's New Year's Eve and my friends are all doing a crossword!!" she exclaimed.
And this, friends, is what a bunch of nerd-leaning people do on one of the biggest party nights of the year – spreading out the New York Times Super Mega, the crossword of crosswords that marks the end of the NYT year, and debating clues between sips of pink wine.
After the music got louder and our friend got more persistent, the five or so of us who were circled around the Super Mega did actually manage to pour a fresh New Year's Eve toast drink and head to the beach to mark the midnight event. But by morning we'd be right back at it. This thing is so huge that it took up an entire giant coffee table. Its clues were printed on an entirely separate page. It took our group of college grads the entire weekend to solve all of them, finishing up just before the housekeeping staff showed up to kick us out of the beach house. It was thrilling to see all of its boxes filled out; its clues all marked with an X.
Super Mega is part of the end-of-year Puzzle Mania feature, described by NYT's crossword columnist Deb Amlen as, "a colorful and fun way to challenge your brain during the holidays. The centerpiece of the section is the Super Mega Crossword, a behemoth of a grid that takes some solvers days to finish." This year's Super Mega included 782 entries and was "mid-week in terms of difficulty," Amlen wrote, referring to the fact that NYT crosswords get harder as the week progresses, with Sunday's being the hardest. Good thing this one was not Sunday-hard, because it already took us days to solve.
Yet in terms of difficult things, it seems that the hardest for this group of nerds – a high school English teacher, a teacher of French, an environmental scientist and a journalist among us – was leaving it alone in order to actually spend some time with friends.