Tag Archives: The Independent

The Week in Puzzles and Games (November 2nd)

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There’s a lot going on in the intertwined worlds of puzzles and games, so let’s skip the intro and get to it.

The End of The Independent Crossword

Despite the outcry of support and messages and kind words about The Independent‘s daily cryptic crossword, there is no sign that The Independent will be reversing their decision. Which sadly means that the 31st was the final crossword.

It’s a loss for solvers, setters, and the puzzle community in general, but there have been some lovely posts and tributes in honor of The Independent crossword’s legacy, so I want to share a few here.

I think bluesky user Jalata covered everyone’s feelings with this post.

Setter Methuselah shared this cryptic in honor of the setters of The Independent.

Setter Phi posted about the intertwined history of The Independent and his puzzles. You should absolutely make time to read this piece.

And setter Bard shared this terrific picture from the York Sloggers & Betters event this year, featuring two dozen setters! What a lovely way to send off this influential outlet.

Farewell, Independent‘s daily cryptic crossword. You will be missed.

David Kwong’s The Puzzle Room Returns for Season 2!

If you enjoy interactive puzzle-solving and magic tricks, The Puzzle Room on Netflix is right up your alley.

David Kwong — crossword constructor, magician, and all-around expert in baffling people with both words and visuals — has already dazzled audiences with 26 episodes of this show, and it turns out they’re already filming Season 2!

David shared some of his thoughts and a bit of behind the scenes detail on his mailing list. Here’s a snippet:

Every episode is a real labor of love. Leading up to each shoot day, the producers and I research our guests and build out the interviews. Producer (and resident genius) Dave Shukan, whom I call the Puzzle Wizard Behind the Curtain, oversees the puzzles and games.

For me, though, the most challenging part of the show is the weekly magic trick. John Stessel, Chris Chelko, and I set out to create original, TV-friendly magic: effects that haven’t been done before and that hold up on camera (and, ideally, against exposure online, though nothing is truly safe anymore). Coming up with new magic on such a tight turnaround keeps me on my toes, and you’ll often find me testing tricks on unsuspecting folks at my local cafe or at the Magic Castle.

I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve seen so far from The Puzzle Room, so congratulations to them on the upcoming season 2!

Puzzmo’s Jubilee Continues!

What a celebration it has been so far! Four new games have been launched: (not) solitaire, Draw 2 Solitaire, FlipFlop Solitaire, and FreeCell.

Plus they’ve made an All Games page (so all their puzzle game options are available) and a customizable Playlist feature so you can make sure only your favorite puzzles are waiting for you daily, no scrolling or sifting required.

The Puzzmonauts have plenty to celebrate and keep themselves busy with, and I suspect the team at Puzzmo isn’t done with the surprises yet before the year is out.

No Westwords Tournament in 2027

There’s loads of exciting crossword tournament news for 2027, including the debut of two new tournaments, the Rain City Crossword Tournament and the Canadian Crossword Open.

But sadly, yesterday it was announced that the team behind the Westwords tournament will not be hosting a Westwords event in 2027.

Although this is disappointing news, we wish all the best to the incredible team that has shepherded Westwords for the last three years, and we hope 2027 is kind to all of them.

The team also shared one of the best resources for tournament solvers, this awesome spreadsheet, for those looking to engage in some tournament solving fun next year.

Two Puzzle Game Sites to Try Out!

One of the coolest things about running PuzzCulture is getting to learn about new puzzles and creators in the puzzle space. Several enterprising constructors have reached out to me recently, and I’m pleased to help spread the word about their puzzly endeavors.

The first is Word Burger from Joyella Studios.

Word Burger is a daily vocabulary challenge where you come up with as many words that start with one particular letter and end with another particular letter. Those letters are the buns, and you need to fill the burger with words!

For example, the top bun could be U and the bottom bun E, and you need to type everything from UPDATE to UNITE.

There’s a 60-second version and a Slow Cook version if you want to take your time.

You can try it out on the Word Burger website, and it’s also available for iPhone and Android!

My other recommendation for you today is Movie Horse.

In this movie trivia game, everyone starts with the same movie, and you have to name an actor from that movie. The game then picks another movie featuring that actor, and you name another actor.

On and on it goes, until you’ve either completed ten links or you’ve exhausted your five misses (either through clicking pass or guessing wrong) and you’ve spelled MOVIE (like spelling HORSE in basketball).

I’ve mentioned playing something similar to this with friends for years now, but I love seeing it gameified like this. You can test your skills against friends, and even see some of the most obscure connections made by other players through the Movie Horse Instagram.

It’s cool to see how many different pathways to success players can take, based on their movie and actor choices.

Click here to try it out for yourself!

To close out today’s post, let’s enjoy something puzzly and seasonal with Cool Patch Pumpkins in Dixon, California.

Launched in 2003, the Cool Patch Pumpkins corn maze revitalized the Cooley brothers pumpkin business, attracting loads of new eyes.

They’ve even been honored twice by the Guinness Book of World Records, including in 2007 for “World’s Largest Temporary Corn Maze.” (Gotta love the specificity there.)

It supposedly takes between 90 minutes and 2 hours to complete the maze, which spans dozens of acres!

Check out their website here for more details.

Did I miss any puzzly news or fun board game stories from the last few weeks? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.

The Week in Puzzles and Games (October 26th)

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There’s a lot going on in the intertwined worlds of puzzles and games, so let’s skip the intro and get to it!

Conversations with the New York Times Games Team!

There are two events coming up for fans of NYT puzzles and games.

First, the 92Y is hosting a New York Times Games Night tomorrow night to celebrate the launch of the new Connections book.

Wyna Liu, Joel Fagliano, Sam Ezersky, and Tracy Bennett will be in attendance to talk shop and engage in some live gameplay with attendees.

Click here for ticket info and here to check out the new Connections book.

But that’s not all.

On Friday, October 30th, the Wordle Review comments section will be hosting a Q&A at 1 PM Eastern with Josh Katz and Tom Giratikanon, the designers behind Wordle Bot and Connections Bot!

Learn more about how the bots work, why they’re so sassy, and meet the team who makes the Bots go.

Cryptic Crossword Updates (and The Independent)

Speaking of crosswords, there has sadly been no sign that The Independent’s managing editor will reverse course on cancelling their daily cryptic crossword.

But even with that dark cloud hanging over the puzzle community, there is plenty going on in cryptic crossword chatter for solvers and setters alike to enjoy.

Chameleon posted a terrific article on MyCrossword about an interesting variation on the hidden-style clue. For example, a traditional hidden clue would have “Scottish snack offered in disco nearby” cluing SCONE, since it’s hidden in “diSCO NEarby.” But Chameleon’s version is slightly more difficult. (Personally, I love it!)

Setter Paul Henderson (known to Independent solvers as Phi) has announced he’ll be continuing his Phidays tradition on his website.

Duncan over at fifteensquared has shared the puzzles being distributed at this year’s York Sloggers and Betters 2026 gathering, so get solving. Feedback is welcome!

And if there’s more news in the cryptic world I’ve missed, please let me know!

Bonmo.app Releases Their 1,000th Puzzle!

We talked about Puzzmo celebrating 1,000 days back in July, but it turns out they’re not the only puzzle app crossing the millennium mark this year.

Bonmo.app just released their 1,000th puzzle, a delightful grid from constructor Carina da Rosa. If you’re an Apple user, check them out!

Reminder: Cultura Connector and the GRIT Ukraine Program Still Seeking Funds

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a charity effort to inspire Ukrainian youths through LARPing.

And the team at Cultura Connector have announced that they’re 60% of the way to unlocking a $20,000 match for the charity!

They are raising funds for their first GRIT Ukraine program, enabling Ukrainian facilitators to lead a 12-week LARP program with Ukrainian young people living in Poland to strengthen resilience, communication, emotional awareness, problem-solving, and connection with Ukrainian youths.

And with a week left to go, your help could make a huge difference.

Please share the link and donate if you can. It would be so amazing to reach out to young people halfway around the world and show them the magic of storytelling while helping build them up.

You can also click here for more details on Cultura Connector and the GRIT program.

The BackerKit Holiday Market Launches Soon!

Crowdfunding is a cornerstone of the puzzles and games industry these days, especially for smaller and independent creators, so I’m stoked to hear that the BackerKit Holiday Market is returning for a second year.

Hosted between November 18th and December 1st, numerous puzzle and games companies (among others!) will be participating.

Unlike most crowdfunding efforts, there’s no funding goal and products will be ready-to-ship immediately.

Some of my favorite shops like Scarlet Envelope and Morgan’s Escapes will be participating, so be sure to check it out!

What Puzzle Words Sent American Solvers to Google?

I love digging into data. It’s fascinating to see what you can learn from sifting through carefully cultivated information.

And I’m not alone in that. The team at UnscrambleX also love data, and they’ve shared some of their findings.

UnscrambleX is a free word scrambler, anagram solver, and Scrabble word finder all in one, and they’ve been crunching solver data for the last year.

And it turns out, between June 2025 and October 2026, the words that baffled or eluded solvers weren’t small, obscure ones, overly long entries, or crosswordese.

As Adrian Talvik, spokesperson for UnscrambleX told me, “The words that stop people aren’t the long ones. They’re words people have seen on a menu or a perfume label but never had to spell.”

NEROLI topped the list with 65,684 US searches on May 28, 2026, twice the next word (POMELO, 31,911 on May 18). Three of the five hardest came from the fruit bowl or the perfume counter, hard days come in themes (BÉCHAMEL, TERIYAKI and TZATZIKI on July 2)…

You can check out their full article here, including how they gathered and analyzed their data.

And we’ll have more interesting puzzle-data tidbits from UnscrambleX in the coming weeks!

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to test out any new puzzle apps or sites this week, but I promise that feature will return next Monday.

Did I miss any puzzly news or fun board game stories from the last few weeks? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.

The Week in Puzzles and Games

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There’s so much going on in the intertwined worlds of puzzles and games, so let’s skip the intro and get to the good stuff!

boswords new

The Boswords Fall Themeless League Kicks Off Tonight!

There’s still time to register for this year’s Fall Themeless League, which officially starts up tonight! (There was a preseason puzzle last week.)

If you’re unfamiliar, the Boswords Fall Themeless League is a clever weekly spin on traditional crossword tournament-style solving. Instead of cracking through a number of puzzles in a single day (or two), the Fall Themeless League consists of one themeless / freestyle crossword each week, scored based on your accuracy and how fast you complete the grid.

Look at that lineup of talent!

Each week’s puzzle only has one grid, but there are three sets of clues, each representing a different difficulty level for solvers. Smooth is the least challenging, Choppy is the middle ground, and Stormy is the most challenging. (When you register to participate, you choose the difficulty level that suits you best.)

Look how many people are participating this year!

Each week’s puzzle is accompanied by a one-hour broadcast on Twitch, starting with a preseason puzzle and broadcast.

The Fall Themeless League then runs the next nine Monday nights starting at 9 PM.

Congrats to the Midwest Crossword Tournament Winners!

The 2026 edition of the Midwest Crossword Tournament was this past weekend, and by all accounts, it was a massive success.

Organized by Shannon Rapp and Sally Hoelscher, the excellent lineup of constructors and editors guaranteed a lively and occasionally devious experience for all involved!

The Chicago Fire was the tougher division, and Minnesota Nice the less-tough-but-still-devious division.

Congrats to all the winners and everyone who participated this year!

Oh, and if you want to watch the Chicago Fire live-solved finals, check out the video:

My deep dive into this year’s tournament puzzles will be posted on Thursday.

More on The Independent Cryptic Crossword

I have a quick update regarding Thursday’s post about the potential end of The Independent‘s daily cryptic crossword.

There is another email address you can contact to show your interest and support!

All you need to do is message trulyindependentcrosswords@gmail.com with the word “Truly” in the subject line.

Leave the body of the email empty, your email alone will count as another person who wants to see The Independent‘s cryptic crossword continue! You’ll get an automated reply letting you know that your voice has been heard.

Hopefully this will show the managing editor of The Independent that the crossword is worth saving!

Spooky Crowdfunding Roundup!

To close out today’s post, here’s a trio of games to support that fit the Halloween / horror / survival vibe nicely that are currently crowdfunding.

The Mysterious Package Company makes some of the coolest, most immersive puzzle-solving experiences on the market today, and if you were a fan of their Doomensions: Mystery Manor pop-up escape room puzzle game a few years ago, then you’re in for double the excitement this time around.

They’re currently running a Kickstarter for two new Doomensions pop-up puzzle experiences: Cursed Tomb and Crimson Castle.

You’ll get to explore these three-dimensional set pieces as you unravel the mysteries behind each puzzly setting.

The attention to detail with Mystery Manor was fantastic, and I really enjoyed the hours spent revealing the puzzle’s hidden secrets and facing each new twist and mystery as it emerged.

If you like at-home escape room puzzle games, you should definitely give one (or both) of these Doomensions a shot.

Another horror-themed sequel game is crowdfunding right now, as the smash hit game Don’t Go In There has gotten a die-rolling successor in, you guessed it, Don’t Go Back There.

This standalone expansion is built on the same template as the original, but with new foes and new effects to deal with.

Plus you can mix and match this game with the original and test yourself against BOTH games’ mechanics and monsters.

Don’t Go In There was part of my 31 Games of Halloween countdown last year, and rightly so. I have no doubt the Road to Infamy team have exceeded themselves with the sequel.

Click here to check out the Kickstarter!

And since we’ve been talking about The Oregon Trail in game form recently, it’s serendipitous that our friends at 9th Level Games have a Backerkit running right now for their new game, Portland, Oregon Trail.

Here’s the pitch:

Like in the OG Oregon Trail game, you might have to ford a river in your Ford and you’ll definitely be contracting a variety of illnesses. But the main obstacle between you and Portland will be capitalism. Your characters have limited resources (and no health insurance), and your roles as societal misfits will make you a target for capitalist villains who hate that you don’t follow their rules. In this game, though, conformity is as good as death.

This GM-less roleplaying game is a collaborative adventure to endure all the nonsense of road trips with modern day anti-capitalist rebel spirit, all in the familiar flavors of the original Oregon Trail we all know and either love, hate, or love and hate.

Check out the Backerkit campaign here!

Did I miss any puzzly news or fun board game stories from the last few weeks? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.

Help Save The Independent Cryptic Crossword!

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Although I have dabbled with cryptic (or British-style) crosswords for years, this year I’ve made more of a dedicated effort to improve my cryptic solving. I’ve tackled Josh Wardle’s Parseword game, sampled cryptics from many different outlets, and tried to learn more about the history of cryptic crosswords.

Along the way, I delved into Sondheim’s love of cryptics and celebrated milestones like 100 years of The Observer‘s crosswords and The Guardian publishing its 30,000th cryptic.

But it was the solving, experiencing all of those different voices and styles across many different publishers, that taught me about the incredible diversity and creativity of the cryptic setter community. Over the last year, I’ve solved puzzles from The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Observer, The Globe and Mail, the Cox and Rathvon archive, and more, as well as a backlog of cryptics from puzzle suites I’ve purchased in the past.

One of my most frequent cryptic crossword stops is The Independent.

And sadly, they’ve announced that they plan to stop publishing the daily cryptic crossword as of October 31st.

The Independent crossword is widely regarded as a breeding ground for new talent. Many commenters have rejoiced in all the new bylines and setters they see on a weekly basis, and solvers all over are lamenting the loss of a marvelous cryptic crossword outlet.

But thankfully, solvers are reaching out.

Simon Anthony at Cracking the Cryptic has shared the news with the CTC audience in the hopes of encouraging solvers to step up in support of The Independent crossword.

If you would like to add your voice to the chorus, you can share your thoughts (respectfully, please!) with Richard Best, managing editor of The Independent, at managingeditor@independent.co.uk.

I’ve already sent a few words there myself, hoping to be a small drop in a larger, more influential torrent of hope, interest, and protest.

If you’re unfamiliar with cryptic solving in general or The Independent crossword in particular, please click the links here and here to read more about the crossword’s influence and see the outpouring of support in the comments.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but The Independent crossword is one of the first cryptic crosswords I ever seriously attempted to solve.

It was 2013 and I was reading John Halpern’s The Centenary of the Crossword, where he chronicled a century of crossword solving on both sides of the Atlantic.

There were many puzzles included in the book, and after exhausting all of the American-style crosswords, I decided to try my luck with the cryptics.

It went poorly.

It was slow going at first.

Years later, I returned to those puzzles, determined to try again. Among the puzzles I finally completed were a 2012 cryptic set by Anax and a 2009 cryptic set by Nimrod, both from The Independent.

So this year, when I decided to improve my cryptic solving, I remembered those puzzles, and made The Independent a regular part of my solving.

Do I still struggle? Absolutely. I am, at best, a mediocre cryptic solver. At the start, I ended up figuring out the word from crossings in the grid and identifying the definition part of the clue, and then reverse-engineering how the clue worked from the answer.

But more and more now, I’m learning the tricks and techniques, and I have slowly started getting better. The moments of total bafflement upon reading a clue are fewer and farther between, and grids are filling faster each week.

And it’s sad to think that — now that I’m finally getting the hang of it! — one of those cherished cryptic outlets is going away.

Hopefully enough people reach out and the managing editor is convinced to reverse his decision. Maybe they’ll follow the template laid out by other outlets and charge a small subscription fee to solvers to offset costs. I think it would serve them well to try.

Solvers aren’t the largest group in the world, but they are among the most loyal.

Here’s hoping The Independent recognizes that.

“Do nine men interpret?” “Nine men,” I nod.

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I’ve written about Bletchley Park and the efforts to crack the German ENIGMA code several times now, both from a historical standpoint and a cinematic one with the recent release and Oscar success of The Imitation Game.

Bletchley Park was the home of world-class codebreakers, chess players, and crossword solvers, but as it turns out, there was one more type of puzzle that the Bletchley Park crew mastered: palindromes.

In their spare time, they had competitions to create new sentences that could be read both backward and forward — like the title of today’s post, one of my all-time favorites — and mathematician Peter Hilton was far and ahead the most gifted when it came to crafting these palindromes. (His penchant for the puzzle was even mentioned in his obituary in the British online magazine The Independent.)

Perhaps you’ve seen his most famous creation, one of the world’s longest palindromes, composed during one sleepless night at Bletchley Park:

Doc note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.

From an article on Vocabulary.com:

Incredibly, the young codebreaker did not use paper or pencil while composing his epic palindrome. He simply lay on his bed, eyes closed, and assembled it in his mind over one long night. It took him five hours.

It all started, apparently, with a contest to best a well-known palindrome: Step on no pets.

Two days later, Hilton responded with the cheeky “Sex at noon taxes.”

And they were off to the races, competing to create longer and more elaborate palindromes. It’s not known how many of the Bletchley Park alums were involved — whether Alan Turing played remains a big question mark — but it’s been said that the competition, instigated by mathematician John Henry Whitehead (nephew of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead), helped spawn the golden age of palindromes.

Some estimate that more palindromes were written in the ten years after Bletchley Park’s competition started than were published across the world in the more than three hundred years that preceded them.

That’s one heck of a legacy.

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