The Atlantic's Variety Cryptic

The blogosphere has been abuzz with The Atlantic’s recent decision to tear down its long-standing paywall.

While most have mentioned trawling the archives for this or that article, few have made the obvious observation: The variety cryptic, by Cox and Rathvon, is part of the package. Perhaps that’s because the boing boingers and Jason Kottke don’t actually do variety cryptics, but I feel like it hasn’t even shown up on my puzzle lists. Maybe it’s always been online, and I’ve never looked?

Cryptic crosswords are crossword puzzles in which the clues have the word definition, but they also have a hefty amount of wordplay to get you to the answer. Thus each clue in a cryptic is really two clues. It’s up to you to determine where one ends and the other begins, and deciphering the clue can be tricky: I often figure out what word should go in the space provided and then try to reverse-engineer the wordplay.

A variety cryptic adds yet another dimension. In a variety cryptic, the answer to the cryptic clues don’t necessarily fit into the grid the way you’d expect. You might have to add a letter, drop a letter, change one fragment to another, or make words “warp” from one part of the grid to another. I remember one variety cryptic, published in The Enigma, of course, where words that contained the names of European currencies had to be transformed so that those letters became EURO. Remarkable became reeuroable, for instance.