Does anyone know where one could find the type of crossword puzzle popular in Britain? I can’t seem to find anything online, and the local bookstore was pretty useless too. If I’m not mistaken, though the basic “rules” are the same as in American crosswords (fill in the letters, duh), the clues in a British puzzle are far more clever and challenging, and often have wordplay and/or anagrams. Since I’ve only visited England for a short time, I didn’t get to see many of these types of puzzles, but the American ones, though fun, are sometimes a bit too easy. Well, thanks for any help!
(It’s not my imagination, right? The English ones are harder, aren’t they?)
Search for “cryptic crossword”. You find these have clues like:
In Capitol, I assault a congressman.
The answer is “Politician”, the result on an “assault” (i.e. a scrambling of the letters) in “In Capitol I” yielding the equivalent of “a congressman”.
My father is quite good at these. I think they appear in the New York Times, as well as Games Magazine.
They also appear in one of Canada’s national newspapers, The Globe and Mail, just in case you had any other ideas that the colonies were undereducated, or something.
The most obvious place to start might be a regular bookstore or Amazon as newspapers tend to publish anthologies (or the crossword equivalent). I don’t know if Amazon.co.uk carries different stock to dotcom.
A fairly straightforward but clever crossword to start with might be the Daily Telegraph’s. The one in The Times is hellishly tricky.
Games Magazine also publishes World of Puzzles, which has more actual puzzles than Games Magazine, which has articles about gameplaying around the world. The two magazines publish on alternate months and are carried at Borders, among other booksellers. They also publish the quarterly World of Crosswords. The same publisher puts out special editions which can be ordered online from Amazon, etc. The one you might most be interested in is:
World of Cryptic Crosswords, list price $12.00 Amazon info
Also available from Amazon (and others):
The Daily Telegraph Big Book of Cryptic Crosswords
The Sunday Telegraph Big Book of Cryptic Crosswords
The Times Crossword (London Times) Books 1 and 2
Thanks, everyone. I guess the key was that I didn’t know they were called “Cryptic Crosswords,” so my earlier searches for “British Crosswords” were in vain. Now I just hope I can make the transition to these much harder puzzles.
I wonder, though; if I had done this type of crossword my whole life, would I find them that much harder? Someone who’s very familiar with both types–are they really that much more difficult, or just daunting because of their difference? They should definitely be challenging.
I suppose many people would find the ‘average’ cryptic harder than an ‘average’ American-style crossword, but there’s such a range of difficulty in both types that it’s impossible to say.
Hard cryptics tend toward subtly misleading clues for fairly common words, while hard US-style puzzles tend toward straightforward clues for obscure words. If you don’t know that obscure word, you’re SOL forever, but an apparently baffling cryptic clue can be perfectly obvious when you come back to it the next day.
Of course, the best cryptic clues are brief and have a fairly simple answer that’s wrong, a more subtle answer that’s also wrong, and a correct answer that’s so blatantly obvious when you finally see it that you could hit yourself on the head for missing it so long. The very best also include an outrageous pun.
Cryptic crosswords - once you crack a particular publication’s “code” - are sort of easier than regular crosswords, because they contain two clues to every answer. Eg in an anagram one, firstly part of the clue means the answer word, secondly part of the clue actually contains the letters for it.
Both The Atlantic and Harper’s have excellent variety cryptic crosswords every month. Henry Hook’s five collections of cryptic puzzles are absolute classics. The Random House series hasn’t published a new set for quite a while, but older editions can still be found in many bookstores.
Many newspapers carry both types of cross words, termed “cryptic” and “simple”, yet I’d say the latter type is more common. Broadsheet/quality newspapers tend to feature crosswords of the cryptic nature, so an option could be searching their websites, perhaps. The main broadsheet publications are “the Independent”, “the Guardian”, “the Telegraph” and “the Times”. I am not an avid cross word fan, so I can’t really offer any further advice, other than an English perspective.
When you start doing cryptic crosswords you might not be able to do any of it, but you do learn some standard tricks, and get thinking the right way. Some people do them frighteningly quickly.
