Games
Introducing The Mini Crossword: Small Squares, Big Finish
Meet The Mini Crossword, our daily 5x5. A few black squares, eight to ten crossing answers, fresh crossword-style clues, and a clock counting up.
There is a specific satisfaction in finishing a crossword, the quiet little click of the last letter landing and the whole grid going still. Most mornings nobody has thirty minutes for that. The Mini Crossword is built for the two minutes you do have. It hands you a small grid, a short stack of clues, and a clock, and asks you to fill every square before your coffee gets cold.
It looks tiny, just twenty-five squares with a few blacked out, and then you reach a corner where one answer crosses another and you remember that a mini can still make you think.
How The Mini Crossword works
Every morning you get a fresh 5 by 5 grid with a handful of black squares. Those black squares carve the board into roughly eight to ten answers, each three to five letters long, running across and down and sharing a letter wherever they cross. Solve one answer and you have handed yourself letters in two or three others.
Playing is exactly what your hands expect. Tap a square to select it, then type. Tap the same square again, or press the space bar, to flip between Across and Down. The clue for wherever your cursor sits shows in the bar beneath the grid, and the arrows beside it step you to the next clue. On a phone there is a built-in keyboard, so the clue stays in view the whole time and nothing from your device covers the board.
The clues are written in the familiar crossword voice. They lean on a little wordplay and misdirection rather than flat dictionary definitions, and every one is checked before it goes out.
The clock is the score
The Mini Crossword is timed, and your time is the whole scoreboard. Nothing starts until you press Start, and the clock only runs while you are actually solving, so stepping away never costs you. There is no move limit and no penalty for a slow, careful fill. When you finish, your time is what you share, and beating yesterday is the only streak worth chasing.
Stuck? Two ways out
Two tools sit in the toolbar. Check looks at what you have typed and flags any wrong letters, so you can confirm a corner without spoiling the answer. Reveal does the bigger favor and fills the entire grid, for when you would rather just see how it came out and get on with your day. Neither is required, and a clean solve with no checks is its own small bragging right.
One tip to start
Start with the shortest answers and the most crossed corners. A three-letter answer has the fewest possibilities, and every letter you lock into it hands a free letter to the longer answers crossing it. Fill the easy crossings first, let those letters spread, and the stubborn middle usually falls on its own.
The Mini Crossword is live now. Tap a square, start the clock, and see how fast you can fill today's grid.
