2026 continues to be a year of big anniversaries in the world of puzzles. Yesterday marked the 155th birthday of Arthur Wynne, the creator of the first modern crossword puzzle in 1913.
And today marks twenty years since the Wordplay documentary first hit theaters.
The documentary chronicled the 2005 edition of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, bringing national attention to the tournament (and inspiring a Simpsons episode about crosswords).
Wordplay introduced a wider audience to several famous names in crossword tournament circles, like Ellen Ripstein, Trip Payne, Tyler Hinman, Jon Delfin, and Al Sanders, as well as highlighting many celebrity crossword solvers like Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Bill Clinton, and more.
And the impact Wordplay had on the tournament itself, and interest in crosswords in general, cannot be overstated.
Wordplay sparked a 40% increase in attendance the year after it aired, and the growing interest in the yearly event caused the tournament to actually change locations from the Stamford Marriott to a larger venue in New York City for 7 years.
And it’s delightfully apropos that this year marked the tournament’s last year in Stamford, once again moving to a larger venue (in Philadelphia this time!) in order to accommodate increased attendance. Synchronicity!
There was even a song for the documentary…
I think my favorite part of the documentary was Will Shortz reading some critical responses (aka hate mail) in good spirits, though getting a glimpse into the creative process of Merl Reagle was also a treat.
Over the last twenty years, Wordplay has gone from introducing many people to crosswords and tournament solving to a time capsule of a particular era in puzzles.
A time when the hundredth anniversary of the crossword hadn’t arrived. A time before crosswords on The Simpsons, before online tournaments and apps like Daily Pop Crosswords or Puzzmo. A time when crosswords were still weirdly considered a niche interest, despite the tens of millions of people solving them every day.
And we can thank Wordplay for helping welcome a new generation of solvers to our puzzly world.
In honor of the anniversary, I’ve got a puzzle for you!
I had the idea for the theme while writing this post and thinking about puzzle history, and I hope you enjoy.
How did you find your way to crossword solving, fellow puzzlers? Was Wordplay your gateway, or was it a friend or a family member? Or did you simply accept the challenge of a grid in your local paper on a whim one day?
Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
It’s time, once again, for me to sit down and try my hand at some tournament-style puzzles. This week, it was the puzzles from this past weekend’s Westwords Crossword Tournament.
Given the talent involved amongst the organizers and constructors, as well as the previous year’s banger crop of puzzles, I had high expectations, and I was not disappointed.
So let’s put those puzzles under the microscope and see what’s what!
Puzzle #1: Western Expansionby Andrea Carla Michaels & Mark Axel
The tournament began with this 15x grid where the word WEST appeared in each theme entry, but the letters were spread further apart with each subsequent answer, offering solvers the Western Expansion promised in the title.
This was a great opener with a fun, accessible theme and a very smooth solve. The vocabulary was playful and the puzzle had great Monday energy. My only quibble was the repetition of YOU in the crossing entries I GOT YOU and WE STILL LOVE YOU, but that’s more of a personal preference than any fault with the construction.
Interesting grid entries included BAD LUCK, HIS LOSS, E-CLASS, and SOBFEST, and my favorite clues were “Duct tape has dozens of these” for USES and “Beatles song about an age that Paul is nearly 20 years past” for WHEN I’M SIXTY-FOUR.
Puzzle #2: Make It Rainby Sophia Maymudes
The second tournament puzzle was a freestyle 15x absolutely loaded with trivia about the West Coast and western cities, as well as two grid-spanning entries about the Pacific Northwest in particular (BIGFOOT SIGHTING and SEATTLE SOUNDERS).
I found the difficulty to be pretty much on par with the first puzzle of the tournament, and I was impressed with Sophia’s clean layout, construction, and delightful grid fill. (The across pairing of MADE PROUD and IMMODESTY was a fun little visual Easter Egg as well.)
Interesting grid entries included LA GEAR, ARMAGEDDON, DIOGENES, and KATNISS, and my favorite clues were ‘Word preceding “dash” or “bracelet”‘ for SLAP and “Quality that’s neither very demure nor very mindful” for IMMODESTY.
Puzzle #3: Pride of Placeby Zhou Zhang and Mallory Montgomery
This 18×17 grid was the largest of the tournament (though Puzzle #5 came close), and the theme centered around common phrases where a W was replaced with a B, as explained by the revealer WESTCOASTBESTCOAST (which is a nice nod to both the tournament’s setting and the fantastic URL for the Westwords website, westwordsbestwords.com).
The puckish wordplay (particularly with READ ‘EM AND BEEP) made this midpoint puzzle of the tournament a treat. I also liked the synchronicity of HASTA LA VISTA and LEAVE NO TRACE reading down, continuing the unofficial theme of related fill entries in grids.
Interesting grid entries included DOG DAD, ODAWA, JOIN US, MALORT, and TREBEK, and my favorite clues were “Fairy tale girl who gets a witch baked?” for GRETEL, “Super-duper promise” for VOW, “Lawless heroine?” for XENA, “Hue grant?” for DYE JOB, and “They were celebrated 35 days ago” for MOMS. So many great clues in this one!
I predicted last year that Puzzle #4 in Westwords could build a similar reputation to the dreaded Puzzle #5 at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, and this year’s Puzzle #4 understood its instructions perfectly.
This 16×15 grid was the toughest of the tournament. Fault lines ran throughout the grid, causing letters to drop out of many of the down entries. These SHAKEUPS related to the shifting of TECTONIC PLATES — our two revealers in the grid! — not only caused PLATE to be removed from those aforementioned down entries, but they also made the across entry ABOVE each fault line scramble/anagram itself into another word!
There was so much going on with this grid, and despite the fault lines, it all fit together seamlessly. (The down words that lost letters STILL spelled actual words.) It was a diabolical bit of crossword construction, to be sure!
Between the down entries with letters from PLATE removed and the scrambled entries across, there was a lot of “I KNOW this is the right answer, but it doesn’t fit” brain scramble as I was solving, heh. But it was an immensely fun challenge to puzzle out.
Interesting grid entries included PIXIE CUT, ANOMALIES, and DRIP PAN, and my favorite clues were “Not exactly a long look” for PIXIE CUT and “Some docs” for IDS.
Puzzle #5: Play Groundsby Sarah Sinclair
After the deviousness of Puzzle #4, and with the freestyle final puzzle looming, Puzzle #5 was a lighter, breezier solve, but one that still managed to pack this 18×15 grid with five punnily-clued entries tied to West Coast landmarks.
And that “play”-ful aspect continued throughout the cluing. We had pop culture trivia, tongue-in-cheek jabs at pop culture and crosswordese, and more facts and details germane to the tournament’s setting. Sinclair went all out with the cluing in this one.
Interesting grid entries included OH HELL NO, KOOPA, SO LONG, and ADORBS, and my favorite clues were “Concave decagon, more familiarly” for STAR, “Knd f lttr mssng frm ths cl” for VOWEL, and “Something read by a cleric… that becomes something read by a clairvoyant when a letter is removed” for PSALM.
Puzzle #6: Finalby Byron Walden
The final puzzle for the tournament boasts a different set of clues for each of the divisions — Beach and Mountain — and Byron constructed a 15x puzzle with smooth fill, cunning cluing, and great variety in vocabulary. This was a Byron Walden special, for sure.
Both the Beach and Mountain versions of the puzzle had kickass clues (including a Reginald VelJohnson reference), and either version would made for a suitable challenge for the tournament’s finalists. I’m glad I didn’t have to try to puzzle this one out in front of a crowd!
Interesting grid entries included BUDDY SYSTEM, STANDING O, HOG WILD, and DAIKONS.
As for favorite clues, here’s a list:
BEACH: “Company with a Breakout hit?” for ATARI BEACH: “Unruly way to go” for HOG WILD BEACH: “Poly relative” for MULTI BEACH: The Galatea pairing of “Water-dwelling divinity such as Galatea” for SEA NYMPH and “Solar system body such as Galatea” for MOON MOUNTAIN: “They’re not sold on the Sabbath” for AGNOSTICS MOUNTAIN: “Alaska is 120 times its size: abbr.” for CONN MOUNTAIN: “Set of safety matches” for BUDDY SYSTEM MOUNTAIN: “Past perfect mood?” for NOSTAGIA MOUNTAIN: “Avon calling?” for BARD
There were genuinely too many to list. Between this one, Puzzle #3, and Puzzle #5, solvers were absolutely spoiled with great cluing this year.
Westwords goes from strength to strength with another standout year of puzzles. The bar is SO HIGH for tournament puzzles these days, and the 2026 Westwords constructors stepped up big time. The creativity was there, the trivia was flowing, and the cluing was fantastic.
We got several different puzzles playing on the Westwords / West Coast branding, and every puzzle felt like it had its own identity and voice, which is not always the case with tournament puzzles as a whole.
If you’ve never tackled tournament-style puzzling before, I would highly recommend giving Westwords a try. It gets you into the flow of solving with the first few puzzles, punches you in the face with a proper challenge, then eases you back into it before the final. It’s a great time.
I can’t wait to see what they cook up for us next year!
Did you attempt this year’s Westwords tournament puzzles, fellow solver? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
Yes, I know this is the New Yorker’s iconography, but sadly this is also the default in some people’s minds for who constructs and who solves the NYT crossword, and it’s awesome we’re taking steps to change that…
The New York Times Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship provides mentorship and support for constructors whose backgrounds and perspectives could be better reflected in our puzzles. We want our puzzles to reflect the experiences of as many people as possible, which means publishing work that displays a wide range of cultural reference points, language usage and communities.
This mentorship gives aspiring constructors (ones who haven’t yet been published by NYT) the opportunity for three months of instruction, advice, and insight from one of the NYT puzzle editors. It’s an incredibly talented list of people to learn from: Sam Ezersky, Wyna Liu, Tracy Bennett, Christina Iverson, Joel Fagliano, and Ian Livengood.
It’s open to constructors seeking guidance on either themed or unthemed crosswords, with specific guidelines when you apply:
If you’d like to work on a themed puzzle during the fellowship, you will need a theme set with theme clues provided. A tentative grid with theme answers placed is helpful.
If you’d like to work on a themeless puzzle, you will need to provide one of the following: a 7×7 grid with clues, a 15×15 grid with clues or a partly filled 15×15 grid with clues.
Good luck to everyone submitting! The world of crosswords is a more interesting, more immersive place when everyone is represented, and opportunities like this make both constructors AND outlets better.
On May 6th, The Guardian published their 30,000th cryptic puzzle, which was set by one of the most celebrated voices in cryptic puzzles, Arachne. Crossword editor Alan Connor called the cryptic puzzle “a perfect little enigma.”
Now, that would have been milestone enough, but as it turns out, the setters of The Guardian had something much more elaborate in store for their loyal solvers: a treasure hunt spanning MANY cryptics.
They’d started two years beforehand.
Back in 2024, they began brainstorming something special for Cryptic #30,000.
A few months later, a series of entries began appearing in the bottom row of particular cryptics. Entries like WELL DONE, BRAVO, and HERE were intended to draw the eye of attentive puzzle fans. (This would prove helpful later for people searching back through the puzzle archives, once they’d learned about the treasure hunt.)
But the creative team were careful going forward, utilizing only chunks of words (ISOURF, INALCH, ALLENG) and not full entries. I can imagine the confusion for those keen-eyed solvers who were already on the trail when the pattern suddenly changed.
This continued throughout 2025 with solvers none the wiser.
The treasure hunt began in earnest when cryptic #30,000 was published.
In cryptic #30,000, Arachne included the phrases PERIMETER TODAY and QUICK CROSSWORD reading out in the grid. (The Quick Crossword accompanies the daily cryptic in The Guardian.) Solvers who then completed the Quick Crossword would then find the following message reading out clockwise on the perimeter of the grid:
LEADER I TAILORED BADLY
A cryptic clue was hidden in the perimeter letters!
Arachne had also included the word ACROSTIC in Cryptic #30,000 as a subliminal hint to solvers for where to look in the editorial that day.
And if you read the first letter of each paragraph in Connor’s editorial, you get the message LAST THIRTY-FIVE PRIMES.
No, wait, wrong Prime…
Diabolical work. That was the pattern to follow in order to uncover which puzzles were part of their long-running secret message, indicating the actual cryptic puzzle numbers to search through, starting with #29581 and ending with #29989.
So what was the message? What was the final result of a year and a half of seeding and sneaking and devious wordplay?
Well done, bravo, here in conclusion is our final challenge. Are you keeping up? Great, there will be a wonderful prize but first you must enter a race. Not an actual athletic race of course, that would be weird. Not that. It’s a cerebral race in the form of a crossword puzzle. It’s a Genius published at noon BST tomorrow. Godspeed!
Naturally, when the hour arrived, a Genius crossword appeared, set by the one and only Enigmatist, another beloved name in the field of cryptics.
Duncan over at Fifteen Squared did an amazing breakdown of not just the treasure hunt but the puzzle that awaited solvers at the end, and it is a mind-bending bit of puzzling.
To start, there were no answer length at the end of each clue, which is definitely a break with tradition when it comes to cryptic crosswords. And that’s for a good reason.
Solvers had to add a letter to many of the answers in order to form the words RECKON, DEDUCE, REASON, and IDEATE beyond the boundaries of the grid.
Yes, they had to think outside the box.
Many of the answers referred to luminaries in their various fields (EINSTEIN, ESCHER, LEONARDO, MANDELA, WATSON, CERVANTES, etc.), making the Genius crossword rather literal.
The first letter of every clue ALSO had something to hide. When you removed the names of two more geniuses reading out acrostic-style, BEETHOVEN and ARAUCARIA (yet another beloved cryptic setter), you get the message IT IS WHAT GENIUSES DO.
Which ties back to thinking outside the box.
Wow. What a puzzle.
So, did the puzzle live up to the hype after ALL of this amazing build-up?
I’ve finally followed the rabbit-hole all the way to the bottom and… wow. Just blown away by the whole thing, to the point of tears at the final mic-drop.
It’s as if a dedicated team of clever people co-ordinated in secret for a year and a half to deliver something that felt like it was designed just for me (and possibly you, if you’re here). Gorgeous, beautiful work.
WELL DONE and BRAVO, Guardian editors and setters and contributors. What an amazing gift to offer your solvers.
Good luck topping this one when you get to the next 30,000 puzzle goal line!
Are you a cryptic solver, fellow puzzler? Would you have been unable to unravel The Guardian’s crafty clues and hidden hints? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
This event is being held both in-person and online, with four themed puzzles and two themeless/freestyle puzzles to challenge solvers. The list of constructors for this year’s event is quite impressive: Andrea Carla Michaels, Byron Walden, Mark Axel, Rebecca Goldstein, Sarah Sinclair, Sophia Maymudes, Mallory Montgomery, and Zhou Zhang.
The event itself is happening on July 26th in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and is sure to be a great time.
Man, we’ve got Westwords in June, Boswords in July, Lollapuzzoola in August, and Midwest in October! Tournaments galore!
International Day of Play!
June 11th marks the third annual International Day of Play!
The United Nations, through UNICEF, created International Day of Play in 2024 to raise awareness of how important the act of playing is to the development and well-being of children.
This year’s theme for International Day of Play is “Protect play, protect childhood.”
Play is so important for all of us. It fosters relationship building and cooperation, reinforces friendly competition and concepts of right and wrong, and maintains that childlike love and whimsy that comes with play that so many of us, young and old, must hold onto at all costs in a world that is so often unkind, unfriendly, and unfair.
You can find out more about International Day of Play on UNICEF’s website.
Free RPG Day is coming soon!
Last, but certainly not least, Free RPG Day is Saturday, June 27th.
The concept behind Free RPG Day is simple. All over the world (but mostly in the United States), local game shops, hobby shops, and other outlets team up with RPG publishers to distribute new, fresh, and most importantly, free material for all sorts of different roleplaying games, systems, and settings.
Sometimes they’re quickstart versions of the games to introduce new players. Sometimes they’re exclusive adventures or modules to play either in-store or at home. Othertimes, they’re entirely new games, free of charge.
Not only can you receive a wealth of new ideas and playing options in one fell swoop, but it serves as a terrific way to meet fellow roleplayers and build a community of game enthusiasts.
You can click this helpful link to find local spots near you that are participating in Free RPG Day, and I would highly recommend searching online for local game shops, game cafes, and even community centers like your local public library to see who is participating.
These shops will often be running demonstrations of games, tutorials on how to play, hosting raffles and contests, and offering terrific sale prices to encourage you to find the game that fits you best.
Every year, dozens of companies get involved, not only to encourage the growth of the game world, but to promote their own products. And what better way is there to get people hooked than with free exclusive materials begging to be tried out?
Keep your eyes peeled for this year’s edition of the Level 1 Anthology, offered by 9th Level Games. It’s a collection of new games by up-and-coming and established RPG creators, all centered around a particular theme. Last year’s edition was all about the end of the Wild West. This year’s is about Stand Up.
This project is close to my heart because I had games featured in the previous two years’ Level 1 collections, and I also have a game featured in this year’s collection!
At this point, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a comedy institution.
This simple idea — a man and his robot pals watching movies with the audience and gleefully poking fun at them — has spanned decades and generations.
And it’s been a good year for MST3K fans.
Not only has a copy of the last lost episode of the show been found — the KTMA-era version of Star Force: The Fugitive Alien 2,” which hasn’t been available since its original airing in November of 1988 — but the RiffTrax team of Bill Corbett, Mike Nelson, and Kevin Murphy have successfully crowdfunded a new quartet of episodes, MST3K: The RiffTrax Experiments.
A glimpse of the new set!
Over the years, this show has gone from local cable to Comedy Central, then to the Sci-Fi Channel. It left terrestrial cable for a while, until crowdfunding resurrected it. Then it streamed on Netflix, and moved to its own private streaming platform (The Gizmoplex, which is sadly shuttering soon). Along the way, it has toured with live shows, inducted new hosts and new robot voices into the cast, and now has constant livestreams running on YouTube.
It has spawned spinoffs like The Film Crew, Cinematic Titanic, and most famously RiffTrax, and new generations of fans are continuing to discover the show. (Plus a very lucky few joined the writing crew in some of the latest seasons.)
And new episodes on the horizon aren’t the only reason to celebrate.
Today marks the start of Halfway to Turkey Day!
Thanksgiving marathons have been an MST3K tradition going back to the ’90s, and the Turkey Day Marathon is so beloved that fans simply can’t wait until November to celebrate.
So Halfway to Turkey Day was born. A marathon of all the previous Turkey Day events, Halfway to Turkey Day starts today and will run through June 2nd. It’s available on Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, RokuChannel, the CW app, plus Samsung, LG, VIZIO and Google Smart TVs and more.
And I’ve been working on a puzzle celebrating Mystery Science Theater 3000, so what better day to share it than today, I ask you?
I hope all of the MSTies out there delight in a puzzly little journey through the history of one of my all-time favorite TV shows.
I’ve tried to make it as inclusive as possible, so no matter who your favorite host is or what your favorite episode is, there should be something for you to enjoy. (Plus I couldn’t resist coloring in a few black squares when I spotted Gypsy/GPC in the grid.)
Happy puzzling, MSTies! And Happy Halfway to Turkey Day!
[Thank you to Jennifer Cunningham, Troy Bond, and Crossword Gentleman Doug Peterson for your testsolving and input!]
PuzzCulture 