A tweet from twitter user @matttomic trended back on February 7 and shows off a clever crossword puzzle from the New York Times. The puzzle has two answers to the question “The better of two sci-fi franchises.” Depending on one’s bias, the answer can be either “Star Wars” or “Star Trek”, but thankfully for this crossword puzzle, either answer still fits pretty well.
Fun little trick in the Sunday New York Times crossword yesterday: the central theme clue was "The better of two sci-fi franchises", and regardless of whether you put Star Wars or Star Trek, the crossing clues worked pic.twitter.com/NS4LDxwxxl
— ℳatt (@matttomic) February 7, 2022
The viral tweet says “Fun little trick in the Sunday New York Times crossword yesterday: the central theme clue was ‘The better of two sci-fi franchises,’ and regardless of whether you put Star Wars or Star Trek, the crossing clues worked.”
As can be seen in the tweet, 70 across has star as the first word. However, the second word can either be wars or trek (depending on what you actually think is better). If the reader answers with wars, they’ll get the following words: wrap, wrist, payers, and leaked. On the other hand, if readers answer with trek, they get: trap, wrist, payees, and leaked. So this crossword puzzle is a very creative way to cater to the two fan groups of the sci-fi movie genre.
This isn’t even the first instance of a crossword with two possible answers. Redditor chewpendous posted this GIF way back in 2011, which shows a very old crossword from the New York Times in 1996.
The answers to across 39 and 43 can either be Cliton Elected or Bob Dole Elected. The question for that item was “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper” This is because the following day was the results of the elections, and either Clinton or Dole could have won (Clinton won in a landslide). All answers that were influenced by across 38 and 43 could be adjusted accordingly, just like the sci-fi crossword.
We hope to see more crosswords like this in the future. It’s a very fun and interesting spin on crossword puzzles as a whole, and we can’t wait for more.
Other POP! stories you might like:
Holy Swift Podcast releases ‘Taylordle’, a Wordle in Taylor’s version
Wordle Archive site lets you play Wordle more than once a day
