Online crosswords for solo or group play

Choosing a puzzle and picking up where you left off

The Crossword needs no preparation: open the game and you will find the list of puzzles available in your language. Each card shows the grid size, the difficulty (Easy, Medium or Hard) and where you left it:

• New: you have not opened it yet.
• Percentage · continue: for example “40% · continue”. Your progress is saved on the phone and resumes exactly where you stopped, with the letters you had already entered.
• Completed · play again: the puzzle is solved and you can do it again from scratch.

You do not need a connection or a list of players: you can solve it alone on the bus or with someone peering over your shoulder. To work on the same grid with other people, each on their own phone, you open a room (more on that below).

How you fill in the grid in the app

1. Tap a white square: the word it belongs to is highlighted and its clue appears at the bottom. Tap the same square again to switch between across and down.
2. Type with the app’s keyboard: the cursor moves along the word by itself. The delete key clears the square or steps back to the previous one. Accented letters count as plain letters.
3. Tap the card showing the current clue to open the full list of clues and jump to whichever one you like.
4. Once every square has a letter in it, the app tells you whether the puzzle is right. If there are mistakes, a counter of wrong letters appears; until the grid is full it says nothing, so it never turns into a spellchecker judging every keystroke.

Check (free) and Hints (paid with tokens)

The Check button is always free and never gives a letter away. Check answer tests the current clue: when you play alone it highlights the wrong letters, and if the word is complete and correct it turns purple and locks, so nobody changes it by mistake. Check grid counts the mistakes across the whole puzzle.

The Hints button, on the other hand, gives you letters you did not have: Reveal letter costs 1 token and fills in the selected square, Reveal answer costs 3 tokens and completes the whole clue. Revealed letters are locked as well. Once a puzzle is 100% complete you can redo it with “Start over”: the app asks for confirmation, empties the grid, and tokens you have already spent are not refunded.

Lucy and Ben on the same grid, step by step

Lucy creates a room and picks an easy puzzle she had already started: the room carries on from the grid exactly as it is on her phone. Ben joins by scanning the QR code. Here is one corner of the grid (the clues are made up for this example).

1. Lucy takes 1 Across, “Baked loaf, often sliced for toast” (5), and writes BREAD. Ben sees the letters appear in real time and Lucy’s cursor moving around the grid.
2. Ben picks 1 Down, “Lights up when it gets dark” (4): the B is already there thanks to Lucy, so he only needs to add ULB.
3. On 2 Down, “Moved quickly on foot” (3), he starts from the R of BREAD and writes RUN. He uses Check answer: in a room the app tells him “1 incorrect letter”, without saying which.
4. Ben rereads the clue, notices that “moved” is in the past tense and corrects it to RAN. Another check: the word turns purple and locks for both of them.
5. Lucy gets stuck on a long word on the right-hand side. Instead of revealing all of it she spends 1 of her own tokens on a single letter: with the right first letter, the rest of the word comes to her.

When Ben wants to see where Lucy is working, he taps the square where her cursor sits and chooses to follow her.

Alone on your phone, or in a room of up to 8

The game is the same in both cases, but a few things change in specific ways:

• Shared grid. In a room (up to 8 players, joining with a code or QR code) everyone writes on the same grid and every letter appears instantly on the other phones. Each player can follow a different clue.
• Starting point. Whoever creates the room chooses the puzzle from their own list: if they had already started it, the room picks up from their progress.
• Check answer in a room counts the wrong letters instead of highlighting them, so nobody has their work corrected in front of everyone.
• Personal tokens. Whoever uses a hint spends their own tokens, not the group’s.
• Starting over a puzzle completed in a room is up to the person who created it, because it empties everyone’s grid.
• At the end the progress stays saved on every device.

The room also works at a distance, with everyone at home: you will find some practical tips in Playing together from a distance.

How to tackle a grid without burning tokens

• Do a quick first pass. Read all the clues and fill in only the ones you are sure of. Every certain word gives you letters at the crossings.
• Start with the short words. Answers of 2 to 4 letters have few possible solutions and unlock lots of crossings.
• Look for grammatical hints. A plural clue wants a plural answer; a clue in the past tense usually wants a past-tense answer, often ending in -ED; an “-ing” word in the clue points to an “-ing” answer; words like “briefly” or “for short” suggest an abbreviation.
• Trust the crossings, not your instinct. If a letter creates an impossible crossing, the mistake is almost always in the word you were least sure about.
• Check before moving on. One wrong word infects every word that crosses it: a free Check answer now saves a lot of rubbing out later.
• If there are two of you, split up. One takes the acrosses and the other the downs, or half the grid each, and you meet up on the most stubborn crossings.

The most common mistakes are revealing a whole word when one letter would have done, and leaving the grid for days with a wrong word pencilled in that blocks an entire corner. The puzzle stays saved, so a break is often the best free hint there is.

Who it is for and when to play it

The clues are written with adults in mind, but an easy puzzle is within reach of children from about 12 or 13, especially if they solve it with a parent. It is one of the few games in the app that works brilliantly on your own, and as a pair it becomes a relaxed pastime for an evening in or a long journey: more ideas in Games for two. In a room the ideal number is 2 to 4 people; you can still play with up to 8, but it is worth dividing the grid into areas. If some of your group prefer quicker challenges, alternate it with Name, Place, Thing.