Just a quick post today to remind you of TWO big crossword events coming soon!
Firstly, Boswords is just a few short weeks away, and they recently announced the constructors for this year’s tournament puzzles.
Chandi Deitmer, Kathleen Duncan, Peter Wentz, Joon Pahk, Damon Gulczynski, and the team of Emily Biegas & Sala Wanetick will be constructing this year. With a rogue’s gallery of top-flight constructors like this, the tournament is sure to be a great time!
Lollapuzzoola will be happening on a Saturday in August — Saturday, August 15th, in fact — and registration is now open!
This year’s event, Lollapuzzoola 19, has been titled “Around the World,” and promises all sorts of puzzly challenges:
Travel the globe with us through crosswords and games — the day includes tournament puzzles, warmup puzzles, a variety puzzle meta suite, a multi-crossword meta suite, and more!
Plus pizza!
There are two solo divisions for competitors: the Local Division (for newer solvers, more casual solvers, or those with less tournament experience) and the Express Division for “hardcore speed solvers with tournament experience.”
For those who solve with a buddy, the Pairs Division is always an option, and of course, the At-Home Division is available for players who can’t make it to NYC. (I’ll be solving from home for sure!)
A great summer of puzzles continues with two back-to-back highlights of the cruciverbalist calendar year.
And since we’re talking crosswords, I’ve got a 13x puzzle for you to solve today.
I tried something a little different this time around, but hopefully you enjoy! (Once you figure out the gimmick, it’ll probably be a pretty quick solve.)
Will you be participating in either Boswords or Lollapuzzoola this year, fellow puzzler? Let me know in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you!
It was disappointingly hard to find an image for the 250th anniversary or the Fourth of July that didn’t make me want to puke, so here you go, a map of America without the idiotic “Gulf of America” crap on it…
I confess, fellow puzzler, when I was planning ahead for July’s posts, I struggled with what to write for today. I didn’t feel inspired to create a puzzle around the anniversary, and for reasons political, moral, and also quite personal, I didn’t exactly feel in a celebratory mood when I thought of the 4th.
So I instead cast my mind back to the bicentennial, researching events and celebrations held for the 200th anniversary of the country, hoping for inspiration to strike.
And I fell down a rabbit hole when exploring the subject of time capsules.
Time capsule plaque in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which actually includes the word “sesquicentennial”…
Did you know that time capsules go missing with surprising regularity?
A time capsule was buried in the 1950s at the San Francisco International Airport. It was lost, and then rediscovered during construction in the 1970s. It was lost AGAIN, and then rediscovered again in the 1990s, close to the original intended year of the time capsule’s reopening in 2000. Serendipity.
In my perusings, a single line caught my attention:
And nestled among 150 items in the Chicago City Bank and Trust Company’s sealed-and-locked-away “Time Capsule 1976-2076” is a crossword puzzle
A crossword included in a hundred-year time capsule? One that would be halfway through its journey to the future on July 4, 2026?
I wondered what crossword was chosen to represent the world at the time.
So I immediately went on the hunt for more information.
First, I wanted to establish that the time capsule’s location was still currently known. After reading about all those lost and misplaced ones, this felt like the prudent place to start.
With the assistance of Annika Kohrt, Public Services Librarian at the Chicago History Museum, I found the location of the original bank in question at 815 West 63rd Street, Chicago.
The building is now a Chicago Landmark, as well as the home of the Englewood branch of US Bank. After talking to several very helpful and probably confused bank employees about the time capsule, I spoke to the bank manager, Tiffany, who kindly confirmed that the time capsule is intact in the bank’s vault.
I couldn’t ask for further details without sounding like I was plotting a heist, so I tabled my inquiry there.
So the time capsule still exists. Excellent!
Annika also provided me with some newspaper articles about the time capsule — librarians are the BEST, seriously — which indicated that a copy of The Chicago Defender newspaper was included in the time capsule.
The Chicago Defender is a remarkable institution.
This weekly African-American newspaper was founded in 1905, reporting on important issues of the day, railing against Jim Crow laws and segregation practices. Langston Hughes, Ida B. Wells, and Gwendolyn Brooks were among the important voices who wrote for the Defender over the years.
It became a daily newspaper in 1956, serving as a crucial voice during the Civil Rights Movement, and wouldn’t return to its weekly format for over 50 years. It is still publishing to this day in online format.
By the time the bicentennial rolled around, the Defender had celebrated 70 years as one of the most influential and outspoken periodicals in the country.
And, in fact, two different issues were included in the time capsule: the 70th anniversary edition of the Chicago Defender and the 1976 Bicentennial edition of the Chicago Defender.
With the assistance of Tony, one of the Ask a Librarian pros from the Chicago Public Library, I learned quite a bit about the Defender.
Including the fact that the Defender didn’t have a regular puzzle section in the paper.
I was barking up the wrong tree.
I was not deterred, though. With the deft help of capable researchers like Annika and Tony — I swear, the Internet is borderline unsearchable at this point, thank ALL the gods for librarians — I had confirmed the time capsule’s location, current status, and some of its contents.
So I started poring through newspaper archives and articles related to “Time Capsule 1976-2076.”
And as you might expect, Midwest newspapers gave quite a bit of coverage to the time capsule. Citizens had months to suggest items to place inside. Those items were then on display for the public to enjoy, before being sealed away that December to await the citizens of Chicago in 2076.
Items inside included:
a letter penned by the late Mayor Daley to the people of 2076
a sheet of Chicago Bears 1976 season tickets
documents from Englewood Hospital and other crucial public services
half-hour recordings of radio shows about the time capsule’s creation
albums from Johnny Mathis (“I Only Have Eyes For You”) and Sammy Davis Jr. (“Now,” featuring “Candy Man”).
Items cataloguing Chicago’s history past and present, as well as recipes, magazines, and books recounting the histories of various industries and cultural institutions, were also included to provide a snapshot of life at the time.
And among all those items, I finally spotted the item that had thus far eluded me in my historical deep dive into the time capsule:
“Dell Publishing Company – Crossword Puzzles, December, 1976.”
Unfortunately, not the issue in question, but one from the same year. Look at that disconnected grid. *shakes head*
I’ve reached out to my friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles to see if a copy of this magazine is in their archives. If so, I’ll update this post and let you know!
Oh, one more thing.
In my research, I finally found the full article containing the brief snippet that inspired this post, and I discovered a word had been cut off in the original scan.
The text actually read:
And nestled among 150 items in the Chicago City Bank and Trust Company’s sealed-and-locked-away “Time Capsule 1976-2076” is a crossword puzzle magazine.
A single word could’ve changed my entire approach.
But then again, there’s so much I wouldn’t have learned if that word had been part of my original game plan, so I don’t regret the journey.
Fifty years from today, the citizens of 2076 Chicago will be celebrating the tricentennial with, among many other symbols of times gone by, a puzzle magazine that is still being published today, and hopefully one that will still be publishing fifty years from now.
Those folks will probably never read these words.
But I want to thank them anyway.
I want to thank the people who put together that time capsule, and the people who will be opening it, for putting a little bit of feeling back into this particular July 4th for me.
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.
PuzzCulture 