The pleasures of the New York Times crossword do not in fact rival the raptures described by Thomas De Quincey, and they are consequently much less dangerous, but they are considerable, nonetheless, and I fear I spend too much time with them. Besides that, the chief of my confessions is that I routinely turn on autocheck if a puzzle is more than a day old. I also use Google freely. I am strict, however, in doing real searches for the information I need. Any result that includes the word “crossword” is off limits. I have become skilled at rephrasing the clue in such a way that I get few of such results. It’s obvious that there are a lot of people Googling the clues verbatim. Of course, I enjoy it when I can complete a puzzle without help, as I usually can on Monday and Tuesday, when the puzzles are easiest, but the real pleasure for me is in cracking the thematic codes that the puzzles’ authors devise, most explicitly on Sunday. Their ingenuity is remarkable. I have tried my hand, with some success, at writing puzzles myself. It is not easy, and the effort has taught me to forgive the Times authors for resorting regularly to arcana like obsolete spellings, transcriptions of vocalizations that are not words, the tiresome obscurities of sports abbreviations, and the infuriating use of punning in the clues. All part of the game, and unavoidable in a big puzzle. So thank you, Mr. Shortz, and your several colleagues, for many hours of happy mental exercise.

For $2 or $3, you get access to the archive of the daily puzzle in addition to all the Monday through Sunday puzzles as they come out. A gold star is availablefor each new puzzle that you complete on the day of its issue. It’s an addictive feature that has kept me completing the puzzles each day now for the past two months and counting. Other collections of themed puzzles are available for nominal fees. The included archive alone looks to be enough to keep me occupied for several years to come, at least. These are fun puzzles to experiment with, since the technology allows for rapid, easy letter replacement. I frequently go with my gut on difficult and obscure answers, sometimes finding them surprisingly correct, sometimes transforming entire puzzle quadrants from one set of answers to a largely different set. The letter replacement feature makes this app a clear favorite over the old pen and paper technique. I use the app each day and highly recommend it.

Well, the nature of crossword puzzles is definitely fun but it is definitely frustrating too! I enjoy this app a lot and my only comments are that there are times when there are errors, or maybe they’re built in traps to make you think harder, however I can’t really be sure about that, only the puzzle creator actually knows. When you know you have the right words in the right spaces and some of the words just don’t compute correctly in a way that simply cannot be reconciled, something is going on. Maybe the puzzle masters have time constraints and are rushed, maybe they think these irreconcilable differences make players think harder, etc - I mean who knows?? But those glitches are definitely in these puzzles and they make the puzzles all the more puzzling-right?!? So, isn’t that the real point??Ok, so the other word thing is that players beware! Do not ever allow yourself to be pulled off your game page for any reason because everything you’ve been working on or have finished disappears in a nano second it you blink away from your page! You can be working along thinking everything is fine and maybe you look away for a moment or you rub your eyes and the next time you look down you’re on a new page and all your work has escaped into the ether, the black hole where all your concrete synapses for the past hour live have suddenly moved on to a new home never to be seen again - Boom!! And you’re done. . .So, protect your work and don’t let the fluidity of any frequency snatch your puzzle away when you’re almost done, or worst yet when you’ve just finished.

Pips should be a fun game but the UI/UX is terrible. The pieces are at the bottom of the screen, so when you drag them up to the board it’s very easy to trigger an iPhone’s active app browser function. The game makers don’t have iPhones? They didn’t hear that they got rid of home buttons and now you swipe up from the bottom to switch apps?And why have the pieces so far from the board in the first place? It makes the game harder because of another design flaw: if I’ve placed a piece and then want to rotate it and move it to another spot, I’m cooked. If I don’t need to rotate it, easy, I just drag it over. If I don’t need need to rotate it, first I have to tap it to unplace it. Sometimes that’s annoying but maybe works as a fail safe against accidental tapping. But after unplacing it, I have to tap again to rotate it. Wouldn’t be a problem except that if the pieces rotates in a way that lines up with empty spaces, it automatically places itself back into the board. 99% of the time, that’s not helpful, and it means having to unplace it again (eats up time), drag the piece back down to the holding area (eats up time), rotating there and then dragging it back up to the board (eats up time), and hoping I don’t accidentally trigger my phone’s switch-app function (eats up time). In a game where ranking is based on Olympics-level differences in performance time, this makes the game very frustrating.