A Crossword a day…
… and here’s my takeaway
The habit of solving daily crosswords has been relegated to long mornings of the middle-aged, a medicine of choice for the reclusive, and, more often than not, a surefire way to be labeled a geek.
Crosswords have also never been big on my to-do list, largely due to the enormous patience they require and also because one has to wait for a day to know the answers to most newspaper crosswords.
This was until I was introduced to the NY Times Crossword app by a colleague. And there was no looking back.
The app has a wide variety of crossword formats — differentiated largely by size and theme, and comes in a freemium format with a majority of puzzles behind a paywall. More importantly, the app’s ‘Daily Mini’ solves both the issues I had with crosswords — it hardly requires above 3–4 minutes and you get the answers right away. Voila!
I ran through the free trial packs in a matter of days. Unless I paid, all I could do was the Daily Mini. I wasn’t complaining (who pays for crosswords?). It’s been nearly 3 months and I would have missed barely a week’s worth of puzzles in the interim. It has also become a daily challenge between my wife and me on who completes the grid faster.
This daily ritual spanning a couple of minutes has yielded a few good things:
- If faced with a challenge, try all approaches. Fail fast. Don’t know 2-down. Cool. Move to 6-across. Or 7. Or 8.
- You don’t need to have all the answers. At times, I go through the first 2–3 clues in a puzzle and I can’t get a thing. Then I get one, and then another. And as I rummage through the rest, I realise that I did not even have to solve the initial ones to complete the grid.
- Wins are important, however small. I am having a busy day full of phone calls, emails, and a whole lot of shouting and anxiety. Most such days, I pull out the NYT Crossword and get a small win. Ok, at times, I can’t solve that either and that is another kind of hell. But that’s for another day.
- Looking for reassurance midway is fine. Besides a feature to actually know the entire word if you are stuck — which isn’t a great idea, ever — the app also has a feature to ‘check’ a particular word. Mostly just knowing you got that word right sets you on the path to completion with renewed confidence.
My love for the app was bolstered when the unmatchable Captain Holt in one of my favourite sitcoms Brooklyn 99 referenced to it.
If you have had enough of me yapping about this app, take a shot at it right away. And let me know how you like the experience.
P.S. I realised rather recently that the app has a customisable leaderboard where you can measure yourself against daily timings of friends. Find below a link if you want to be added to my board. Let’s play!
https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/leaderboards/invite/40149ac8-628b-469b-9038-fa2e99d10864
