Learn crosswords, from NYT to cryptics, in six months
Six months of one puzzle a day — about 15 minutes on most days, longer on weekends — takes a curious beginner from staring at a Monday New York Times grid to finishing Thursdays and solving an easy British cryptic. Roughly 60 hours. You won't be fast. You'll understand how every clue works, which is the real skill.
6 months · ~60 hours · finish a Thursday NYT and a Guardian Quiptic without help
1.The New York Times Crossword, Monday to Wednesday
NYT puzzles get harder through the week: Monday is gentle, Saturday is brutal, Thursday has a trick. Start with Mondays only — use the archive to do one every day, not one a week. Look things up freely; reveal a square when you're stuck for five minutes. You're not testing yourself yet, you're learning crosswordese (ERA, OREO, ETUI) and the conventions: a question mark means a pun, an abbreviation in the clue means an abbreviated answer. Move to Tuesday when Mondays fall in under 15 minutes, then Wednesday.
NYT Games ~$40/year or ~$4–6/month
NYT Crossword →2.Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle
Michael Sharp has blogged every single NYT puzzle since 2006 under the name Rex Parker. After each solve, read his post. He explains the theme, the tricky clues and the answers you guessed without understanding — and he is grumpy and opinionated about bad fill, which teaches you what good construction looks like. Once you're on Thursdays, his explanations of rebus squares and theme gimmicks are where the learning happens.
Free
rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com →3.Minute Cryptic
Cryptic clues have two halves: a straight definition and a piece of wordplay — an anagram, a hidden word, a homophone, a container — that leads to the same answer. Minute Cryptic teaches this one clue at a time, with three short courses (letterplay, wordplay, weirdplay) and a single new clue every day with graduated hints. Do the courses in a week, then the daily clue alongside your NYT puzzle.
Free
minutecryptic.com →4.The Guardian Quiptic + Fifteensquared
The Quiptic is the Guardian's weekly cryptic designed for beginners, with fair clues and generous anagrams, and the entire archive is free. Solve one, then read the clue-by-clue explanation on Fifteensquared, a volunteer blog that parses every Guardian cryptic. Once you finish a Quiptic unaided, try the Monday Guardian cryptic, usually the gentlest of the week.
Free
Guardian Quiptic →If this doesn't fit you
If you only care about cryptics — you're in the UK, or a friend has hooked you on the Times — skip the NYT entirely. Do the Minute Cryptic courses, then the Quiptic with Fifteensquared from week one. Expect the first month to feel hopeless: most beginners solve two or three clues per grid. By month three you'll finish most of a Quiptic.
Why this path
Crossword skill is pattern recognition, and patterns come from volume plus explanation. Solving without reading the answer breakdowns is how people plateau at Wednesday for years. American puzzles come first because they build vocabulary and grid sense with less frustration; cryptics come second because they reward the same habit of reading clues literally. Don't treat looking things up as cheating. In the first three months it's how you learn.