learn how to solve cryptic crosswords

I get a lot of satisfaction out of doing cryptic crosswords. I can be a happy to get a few clues where as normal crosswords I needed to finish them to be satisfied.

Wikipedia article on it and http://www.solving-cryptics.com got me on my way pretty good but im sure there’s heaps of sites

I love the double challenge of first having to figure out the type of clue, and then having to puzzle out what it actually means.

And once I do work out the answer, I love backtracking to see how cleverly the puzzlemaker built the clue to provide just the right balance between being challenging and being possible to decipher (eventually).

That said, I’m badly out of practice, and these days I’m rarely able to solve an entire cryptic in the limited spare time I’m willing to devote to it.

Its boring and not worth it

I can normally get a couple of answers fairly quickly, but that means there are usually heaps of things I don’t have the foggiest about. I’ve practiced online and I have a book at home to practice on too.

Mostly there are rules to follow which help you solve each one. I need to relearn and remember these rules.

I’m not actively working on this at the moment.

I printed off a guide to solving cyptic crosswords from the web the other day and sat down last night trying to solve some from an old book of crosswords that i had. I actually managed to get a few (which was a really cool feeling and i did backflips around my bedroom) but still learning.

It took a while, but I can usually finish one in a couple of days now, instead of throwing in the towel after a week. I love the wordplay.

I totally admire people who can do these. I love puzzles in general but my vocabulary is pretty crap

I’ve been solving these crosswords for years (usually the ones in the Israeli weekend papers), but I don’t remember having learned how to do it, and I can’t imagine what teaching it to someone (e.g. my wife, who hates this stuff) would be like – it just comes naturally, I guess.

we sit together with the weekend paper, and team work.
when we were on our honeymoon in NZ we bought a small book of cryptic crosswords in English and gave that a shot. i think it went rather well too. I thought that it would made a lot of difference to do it in a different language, but apprently it wasn’t. It is pretty systematic, you need to apply one of not so many principles, and have a strong vocabulary with a tendency to the more obscure words…

before i met my DH, i used to solve them with my dad for years. he was the one who taught me how to solve them to begin with. sometimes the three of us are sitting before family dinners and enjoy thinking together.

I can do the ones in GAMES magazine, but am generally stymied by the ones in, say, the Atlantic. And I think if I tried to do a British one, I’d just throw up my hands. So, I get them, and I’ve done a million of them, but it really depends on the source.