Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Clues And Answers For Sunday, November 17th

In case you missed Saturday’s NYT Mini Crossword puzzle, you can find the answers here:

I’m sure all you Crossword players enjoyed watching the Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson fight last night, or are at least enjoying the plethora of memes it’s led to today online. And if you didn’t tune in, I don’t blame you. It was ridiculous. There are other better things to watch (in my streaming guide!) that don’t involve a 27-year-old fighting a 58-year-old live on Netflix. Besides, there are puzzles to solve. Let’s solve today’s Mini!

The NYT Mini is a smaller, quicker, more digestible, bite-sized version of the larger and more challenging NYT Crossword, and unlike its larger sibling, it’s free-to-play without a subscription to The New York Times. You can play it on the web or the app, though you’ll need the app to tackle the archive.

One good tactic with crossword puzzles is to try to get as many ACROSS as possible first and then you’ll find a lot of the DOWN are already done—or vice versa if the ones ACROSS are trickier.

While some of today’s words are pretty simple, some might have you stumped. You’ll find the answers below. Spoilers ahead, obviously. Skip ahead for the image of today’s solved puzzle.

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ACROSS

1 — Someone for whom a velvet rope may be lifted, in brief — VIP

4 — Workplace with pickaxes — MINE

5 — Puff piece? — CIGAR

6— Lose a staring contest — BLINK

7 — Parts of Crocs that say "crocs" on them — SOLES

DOWN

1 — Candlelight ceremony — VIGIL

2 — Totally harebrained — INANE

3 — Company car and a free gym membership, for example — PERKS

4 — Venus de ___ (sculpture) — MILO

5 — "60 Minutes" network — CBS

Another Mini with some genuinely tricky words, but mostly pretty easy to figure out. I was eating messy tacos while solving this. I do not recommend it if you want a decent time. I was hungry! The first couple “Across” words were a breeze, but I wasn’t sure about “Puff piece?” until I’d filled in more. Most of the “Down” were pretty straightforward, though I didn’t know “Venus de Milo” and had to fill it in with other words. I accidentally put an “A” at the end of INANE instead of an “E” and that threw me off because 7-Across became SOLAS, the name of a character in the new Dragon Age game. I figured it out eventually. Today’s took me a messy, taco-induced 2:34.

How did you do? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

If you also play Wordle, I write guides about that as well. You can find those and all my TV guides, reviews and much more here on my blog. Thanks for reading!