Wordle Is Too Easy, but Now I’m Obsessed With These Daily Cryptic Puzzles
I find it satisfying to do a word puzzle (or three) each day.
Wordle is great, but it’s not really exciting anymore.
Crosswords are fun if you have the time (I love an NYT Thursday puzzle) but I don’t always bother.
My sweet spot, lately, are games like Minute Cryptic and Parseword —which are entry points into the incredibly bizarre world of British “cryptic” crossword clues.
Cryptics are a type of word puzzle unlike anything else.
There exist whole crosswords full of them, but the daily puzzles I’m writing about are just one clue per day, so you can focus on exactly what’s going on in that single clue.
Cryptics look like a regular crossword clue—a short bit of text with a single word or phrase as an answer—but the way you come up with the answer is by re-interpreting the clue as instructions for wordplay.
You might realize you’re being asked to anagram a word, insert another word inside of it, flip a word backwards, or any of a variety of other devilish tricks.
For example, one recent Minute Cryptic clue was “Learn 1970s-style dance music!
$5 off per beginner!” To solve it (which took me a few hints) I needed to do the following: Ignore the word “learn” for now, since it will turn out to be the definition of the word I’m trying to find Translate “1970s-style dance music” into DISCO Translate “$5” into another way to write the number five—the roman numeral V Take off the beginner of the word “per,” leaving me with ER Put those bits together to make the word DISCOVER, a synonym for “learn.” If you scream “are you fucking kidding me?” at your phone when you figure out the answer, you’ve done it right.
Another favorite of mine was “box for dead pet of Schrödinger contains almost half-skeleton.” To construct a “box for dead,” you put the letters SKE (almost half of “skeleton”) inside of CAT.
So you get CASKET.
Get it?
I’ve always loved regular, nice, American crosswords—where the clue is a definition and that’s all there is to it—and figured the cryptic type 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 hints.
