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The Guardian Cryptic Crossword Treasure Hunt… Revealed!

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Cryptic crosswords have been getting a lot of attention this year.

Josh Wardle launched his Parseword daily puzzle, Barry Joseph has taken us on a fascinating journey into Stephen Sondheim’s love of puzzles and games (review coming soon!), and The Observer celebrated one hundred years of cryptic crossword puzzles back in March.

And just last week, The Guardian pulled back the curtain on a multi-year surprise for solvers that celebrated not only a milestone in longevity, but in creativity as well.

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!

This cryptic clue can be parsed with “Leader” as the definition, and “badly” indicating that “I tailored” needs to be rearranged. “I tailored” anagrams into EDITORIAL, pointing to the piece Alan Connor wrote that day in celebration of the 30,000th cryptic.

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?

29581 WELLDONE
29587 BRAVO
29599 HERE
29611 INCONCLUSION
29629 ISOURF
29633 INALCH
29641 ALLENG
29663 EAREYOU
29669 KEEPINGUPGREAT
29671 THEREWI
29683 LLBEAWON
29717 DERF
29723 ULPRIZ
29741 EBUTFIR
29753 STYOUM
29759 USTENT
29761 ERARAC
29789 ENOTAN
29803 ACTUALATHLETIC
29819 RACEOFC
29833 OURSETH
29837 ATWOULD
29851 BEWEIRD
29863 NOTTHAT
29867 ITSACER
29873 EBRALRA
29879 CEINTHE
29881 FORMOFA
29917 CROSSWORDPUZZLE
29921 ITSAGEN
29927 IUSPUBL
29947 ISHEDAT
29959 NOONBST
29983 TOMORROW
29989 GODSPEED

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’ll give the last word to Redditor colinbeveridge, who shared this heartfelt response to the entire endeavor:

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.

Meet Parseword: Making Cryptic Crosswords Less Cryptic!

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You might not know Josh Wardle by name, but you certainly know his viral creation, Wordle, and you’ve no doubt seen friends and family members sharing their solving results daily.

A few days ago, Josh launched a new puzzly endeavor called Parseword.

It’s a definite step up in complexity from Wordle, but you can still see some of Wordle’s foundation in Parseword. After all, Wordle is all about deduction, playing with the pieces in front of you, and slowly (or quickly) applying what you’ve learned to discover the day’s word.

Parseword works in a similar fashion, but instead of using the letters in front of you to uncover the word, you’re using a Cryptic Crossword-style clue to unravel the answer word.

Image courtesy of New Scientist.

The clues in Cryptic Crosswords, also known as British-style crosswords, are longer, incorporating all sorts of wordplay, while concealing the definition within the clue as well. Each clue is a puzzle unto itself.

Here’s an example of cryptic-style cluing: “Quoted from edict wrongly (5)”

The definition part of the clue consists of the first two words, “quoted from.”

“Wrongly” indicates that part of the clue needs to be changed. This hints that the other word, “edict,” is not what it seems. EDICT, when anagrammed, becomes CITED. “Quoted from” defines CITED. Two ways to get the answer, one straightforward, one more challenging.

There you go. And that’s only one trick in the Cryptic Crossword cluing arsenal.

Cryptic clues can hide the answer between words, as in “Scottish snack offered in disco
nearby (5),” where “diSCO NEarby” conceals SCONE, the “Scottish snack.” They can offer two different definitions, as in “Desire for Japanese money (3)” for YEN.

Answer words could read backwards, or hide as initialisms or acronyms in the clue words. There could be soundalike words, or rebus-style assembly of the answer word. There’s loads of trickery and camouflage, especially in the hands of clever setters or constructors.

Parsewords is an interactive way to learn how to unravel Cryptic-style cluing.

Josh recently did an interview with The New Yorker, sharing his inspiration for the new puzzle game:

Wardle had tried cryptic crosswords when he was younger, but found them to be impenetrable. “I didn’t know how to begin,” he told me. The rules could seem arcane, almost impossible to deduce.

By treating the clue like a formula to be simplified, a linguistic version of P-E-M-D-A-S, the formerly impenetrable word salad of a clue starts to transform into something more recognizable. It’s a little bit like Ben Gross’s Bracket City puzzles.

Here, let’s take a look at yesterday’s puzzle and I can show you what I mean.

So the puzzle starts you off by highlighting the definition part of the clue: “Plan of action.”

We must now unravel how we get an 8-letter answer from what remains: “Get back in errant.”

Thankfully, the puzzle also prompts you with which particular forms of cluing manipulation you’ll need to use: a replacement, a reverse, and a container.

I found the reverse quickly. GET BACK told me literally what I needed to do, so I highlighted the entire phrase, which gave me the options to replace the phrase with a synonym like RECLAIM or RETAKE, or to literally turn “get” back, reversing it to read TEG.

“In” tells me the container aspect of the puzzle. TEG would be placed inside of something. But I couldn’t think of any way to play with the word ERRANT that would get me to a synonym of “plan.”

I clicked on ERRANT and the program gave me several replacement options: Wrong, Stray, and Guilty.

I clicked on STRAY, which replaced ERRANT in the clue.

Finally, I highlighted all three, allowing me to place TEG in STRAY, giving me the answer word for “plan of action”, STRATEGY.

It’s a really playful, visual way to describe how Cryptic Crossword cluing works, giving solvers chances to try replacements and anagrams, then reset when they’ve gone astray.

I don’t exactly expect it to take the world by storm the way Wordle did, but there’s something wonderful about a puzzle that trains you to be better at another kind of puzzle. It’s puzzly community and encouragement, which is one of the best things about being a solver.

I haven’t checked out today’s Parseword yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

What do you think of Parseword, fellow solver? Are you a Cryptic Crossword fan? A Parseword enthusiast? If not, will this get you to try the British sibling to our beloved American crosswords? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

[Thank you to our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles for the examples of Cryptic Crossword cluing. Check out their marvelous How to Solve Cryptic Crosswords guide here!]