We found The New York Times Crossword Puzzle Game over the weekend at Toys R Us selling for about $24.99 US. This game is so astonishingly unplayable that I have to believe it was never playtested.
Players each get a list of clues for the crossword puzzle that is placed in the middle of the table. On your turn you turn over a 2 minute timer and tell an opponent to complete one of the clues in the crossword - hoping they won't be able to get it in the time allotted. If they succeed, they are given a point for each letter of the word. If they fail the turn passes. At the end of the game the completed puzzle is compared to the actual solution and points are subtracted from your score for words you got wrong. There are a few other rules to deal with mid-game corrections and what to do when your word intersects with one that you think is incorrect, or when you simultaneously complete multiple words by filling in an intersecting word.
The problems are obvious. My wife and I spent the first hour looking at a blank puzzle, giving one another clues to words we knew the other would not get. There are over 100 total clues on a puzzle so you could probably spend an evening that way. Our first rules modification was that you could not give the same rule twice and you had to give a clue that intersected with a word that had been already filled in. We began this by each giving one another an easy one and then trying to stump the other with ensuing clues. This has the same problem as the original game but cuts down the number of unanswerable clues you have to go through before being forced to give your opponent a "gimme." Ultimately this boiled down to turn order and soon became tiresome.
Finally, we came up with a highly playable and fun variant. Each person gets 2 minutes to answer any clue they want to! Now the competition became fierce and fun. We were busily searching for the longest words, knowing that the more time we used the more time our opponent had to think. We jockeyed between taking quick "gimmes" to throw off the other while we tried to hunt out the high scoring words.
By the end of the evening we had figured out how to have fun with the $25 we had spent. The only problem was that you could play exactly the same game with any crossword puzzle— no need for a boxed set. True the contents include 6 colored markers, a large puzzle pad (about the size of those big Dell books grandmothers buy) and separate clue/scoring pads, but there was nothing you could not create of equal quality at home. The one redeeming quality of the components is that the puzzle pad fits in a plastic tray with a bump on the bottom that allows you to turn its orientation easily. There may be an even more interesting game hidden in here based upon spinning the puzzle at high speed and seeing who can get closest to the waste basket.
As a frame of reference, my wife and I are fans of the NYT Sunday puzzle and complete it at least 80% of the time. People who are less familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the puzzles will probably find it even more annoying and unplayable than we did.