Cryptic Crosswords

After already covering Acrostics, PandAs, and Vowelless in my Variety is the Spice of Puzzles series, we finally get to the form many consider the quintessential variety puzzle — cryptics.

These are tough to break into, but they are hugely satisfying to solve. Standard advice: work with a friend! Cryptic grids have many unchecked squares (they’re not all part of both an Across and Down answer) but they’re internally checked. Each clue has two parts: one that describes the answer, and one that explains how to construct it.

That’s not a useful definition when you’re first starting out. Fortunately, there is plenty of help on the web. Here’s one from The Guardian, and an old one from Cox and Rathvon at NYT.

Cryptics at XWord Info

Cryptics are no longer available on nytimes.com but if you have an XWord Info subscription, you can solve and print most of them. You can see the answers to every cryptic going back to 1997.

The problem, sometimes, is that even when you see the answer, it doesn’t make sense. And this is where XWord Info shines. For puzzles from the past few years, our answer pages also include a detailed explanation, provided by the Times.

For example, here’s the February 19, 2023 cryptic. Below the grid, you see the clues and answers, and below that, you get the reasoning behind each.

Looking at the most recent

The June 11 cryptic is by Fred Piscop. Caitlin Lovinger’s Wordplay column dissects some of the trickier answers.

And when that’s not enough, the complete explanation is here.

I’m hooked. Now what?

Once you go cryptic, you may never be satisfied with a normal crossword again. Well, you will, but you’ll miss the cryptics because they’re so infrequent.

Fortunately, other venues are starting to include more cryptics, including The New Yorker.