The New York Times Acrostic Puzzles Volume 11: 50 Engaging Acrostics from the Pages of The New York Times

The New York Times ceased publishing these in subscriptions earlier this year so I bought several from earlier years and plan to savor them. Spiral bound is also a plus., though no my eraser will get a workout compared to online solving. Highly recommend these for lovers of acrostics.

These puzzles were not only challenging but solvable but were also a very good collection of interesting articles.

I love acrostics and these are top notch. I've only done a handful so far, but the quality is excellent. The book is a bit skimpy. You will get more bang for your buck with one of the Simon & Schuster Thomas Middleton collections (185 puzzles each for twice the price of these 50). Middleton's tend to be more literary than these, but so far I've found more variety in style with the NYT ones. So far I haven't found any cryptic crostics, my favorite type, in this book. S & S included a few of those. All in all, these are well worth it.Edit: After nearly finishing the puzzles I'm dropping my rating one star for one reason - the font is just too small. I have extra strong reading glasses just for puzzles and even wearing those I can't see the numbers clearly. Why in the world did the editors choose such a tiny font? there's oceans of white space on every page. They could easily have a number font twice the size it is at least in the clue section.

I have been doing Acrostics for about 30 years including Will Shortz puzzles. I did the puzzles in volume 10 and these are much harder. I want the puzzles to be a challenge and I'm okay with having to come back to them later. The first 5 were way beyond me, but I know very little about mythology, ancient obscure rulers and the former names of little known countries. I googled a couple of them, but then I realized that if I wasn't confirming my answer to the clue I was cheating. So I am skipping the ones I can't get without help. I have been able to finish 7 so far.

I like the Sunday crossword puzzle. I like a challenging puzzle, but these clues are pretty old fashioned. I’m in my thirties, a huge crossword puzzle nerd, and really like acrostics but a lot of these clues were outdated - someone in my generation (I’m in my 30s) would struggle to find any relevance or point of references for the clues. Some of the clues were a real stretch/questionable, this isn’t my favorite puzzle book I’ve purchased.

Acrostics are hard to find. I find the NYTimes collection to be up to date and the perfect, challenging skill level. Wish Amazon carried the entire series. They are not usually carried in bookstores.

This volume of puzzles contains acrostics previously published a few years ago, in the Sunday NYT magazine, but I didn't do them way back when, so no problem--except for those of you who engage a search engine to research your answers-- beware your query could inadvertently bring up a website that has the actual word list answers to the particular published puzzle you are doing. The acrostics are all Cox-Rathvon edited by Short, which means, by and large, that the clues are more reasonably and more contemporary to deal with as an intellectual challenge than the older Middleton and Kingsley acrostic puzzles. Good bang for the buck.

I can't ever complete one of these puzzles, but my husband does them all the time. I gave him this book for his birthday. He is going through them obsessively, so I guess it must deserve five stars.

I was hoping for a greater variety of difficulty in these puzzles - I'm an experienced acrostic solver and would rate most of these 10/10 for difficulty. Lots of super archaic and poorly worded clues. Overall it's fun but having puzzles of varying degrees of difficulty would improve the book.

like the challenge