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.
What is a cryptic puzzle?
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:
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Ignore the word “learn” for now, since it will turn out to be the definition of the word I’m trying to find
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Translate “1970s-style dance music” into DISCO
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Translate “$5” into another way to write the number five—the roman numeral V
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Take off the beginner of the word “per,” leaving me with ER
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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.
How to learn to play daily cryptic puzzles
While my favorite is Minute Cryptic, I’m first going to show you Parseword, since that’s more explicit about teaching you the manipulations you might see in a cryptic clue. When you first visit parseword.com, you’ll get a fairly thorough 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’ll get the option to replace the word with a substitute. If you click two words, you’ll get options for different ways to combine them. The interface lets you click around to explore all the possibilities, which can be a good way of getting un-stuck when you’d otherwise just be staring at the screen wondering what you’re supposed to do.
What do you think so far?
Credit: Parsewords
Minute Cryptic takes a different approach, based on hints. You can decide if you’d like the game to reveal the indicators (the words telling you what operations to do, like “off” and “beginner” in my DISCOVER example), or the fodder (the words you use for parts) or point out which word is the definition. If you’re still stumped, you can ask the game to reveal one letter at a time until you finally get it. There’s no way to fail Minute Cryptic—you’re just told whether you used more or fewer hints than the average player.
On the left, what you first see when you solve a puzzle; on the right, the hints and the video explanation
Credit: Minute Cryptic
Both games are friendly to beginners—no judgment if you need hints, but no hints if you choose not to use them. Parseword can be more structured, with its “learn mode” and automatic suggestions. I prefer Minute Cryptic’s hints, and I love that it recently added a “scribble space” where you can select and rearrange letters—perfect if you know you need to anagram something. (Before that feature was introduced, I used scranagram as my non-cheating anagram tool. You enter your letters, and hit “shuffle” until inspiration strikes.)
After a few days with Minute Cryptic, I started to understand how the clues were constructed. After a few weeks, I was usually solving them “under par.” After a few months, I paid for a subscription that gives you unlimited mini crosswords to do, where each clue has hints available.
Another step in your learning journey, if you’re feeling confident, is trying out the Guardian’s Quick Cryptic. Not only is it smaller than a regular cryptic crossword, there’s also an explanation of the clue types used in the day’s puzzle. For example, puzzle #103 has anagrams, hidden words, soundalikes, and acrostics, but no other clue types. You’ll get practice spotting and solving those four types, but you’re on your own for the solutions themselves.