How to Start Playing Daily Cryptic Puzzles

I find it satisfying to do a word puzzle (or three) every day. Wordle is great, but it’s not really exciting anymore. Crosswords are fun if you have the time (I love the New York Times Thursday puzzles), but I don’t always mind them. My favorite thing lately is games like Cryptic Minute And Analysis word– which are entry points into the incredibly bizarre world of British “cryptic” crosswords.

What is a cryptic puzzle?

Crypts are a type of word puzzle unlike anything else. There are crosswords full of them, but the daily puzzles I write about are just one clue per day, so you can focus on exactly what’s happening in that single clue.

Crypts looks like a regular crossword clue – a small piece of text with a single word or phrase as the answer – but the way you find the answer is to reinterpret the clue as instructions for a word game. You may realize that you are being asked to anagram a word, insert another word inside it, turn a word upside down, or resort to a variety of other evil tricks.

For example, a recent clue from Minute Cryptic was “Learn 1970s-style dance music! $5 off per beginner!” To solve it (which took some advice), I had to do the following:

• Ignore the word “learn” for now, because it will turn out to be the definition of the word I’m trying to find.

• Translate “1970s style dance music” to DISCO

• Translate “$5” to another way of writing the number five: the Roman numeral V.

• Take disabled THE beginner of the word “per”, leaving me with ER

• Put these elements together to make the word DISCOVER synonymous with “learn”.

If you shout “are you kidding me?” » on your phone when you find the answer, you did well. Another one of my favorites was “the box for Schrödinger’s dead animal contains almost half the skeleton”. To build a “box for the dead”, you place the letters SKE (almost half of the “skeleton”) inside CAT. So you get a COFFIN. Get it?

I’ve always loved the nice, classic American crossword – where the clue is a definition and that’s all there is to it – and I thought the cryptic types were basically impossible. But friendly puzzles like Minute Cryptic and Parsewords help you learn the little tricks of the trade, and after playing them daily for a while, I can now often answer cryptic clues without clues.

How to learn to play daily cryptic puzzles

Although my favorite is Minute Cryptic, I’ll show you Parseword first, as it is more explicit about teaching manipulations that you might see in a cryptic clue. On your first visit parseword.comyou will get a fairly complete tutorial.

Rather than just giving you boxes to type in the answer, Parseword lets you click on each word in the clue. When you click, you will have the option to replace the word with a substitute. If you click on two words, you will get options to combine them in different ways. The interface lets you click to explore all the possibilities, which can be a good way to free yourself from getting stuck when you’d otherwise just be staring at the screen wondering what you’re supposed to do.

Credit: Parsewords

Minute Cryptic takes a different approach, based on clues. You can decide if you want the game to reveal the indicators (the words telling you what operations to perform, like “off” and “beginner” in my DISCOVER example), or the feed (the words you use for the parts) or indicate which word is the definition. If you’re still stumped, you can have the game reveal one letter at a time until you finally get it. There is no way to fail Minute Cryptic: you are simply told whether you used more or fewer hints than the average player.

On the left, what you see first when you solve a puzzle; on the right, the tips and the video explanation
Credit: Minute Cryptic

Both games are beginner-friendly: no judgment if you need hints, but no hints if you choose not to use them. Parseword can be more structured, with its “learning mode” and automatic suggestions. I prefer Minute Cryptic’s tips, and I like that it recently added a “scribble space” where you can select and rearrange letters, perfect if you know you need to anagram something. (Before this feature was introduced, I used scanagram like my cheat-free anagram tool. You enter your letters and press “Shuffle” until inspiration hits you.)

After a few days with Minute Cryptic, I began to understand how the clues were constructed. After a few weeks, I usually resolved them “under par”. After a few months, I paid for a subscription that allows you to do unlimited mini crosswords, where each clue contains clues.

Another step in your learning journey, if you feel confident, is to try the Guardian’s Quick Cryptic. Not only is it smaller than a regular cryptic crossword, but it also contains an explanation of the types of clues used in today’s puzzle. For example, riddle #103 contains anagrams, hidden words, similar sounds and acrostics, but no other types of clues. You’ll practice spotting and solving these four types, but you’ll be on your own to find the solutions themselves.