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
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