Avoid Alzheimers, try Cryptic Crosswords

Have you ever done Cryptic Crosswords? Not the usual ones you see in almost every newspaper, but the ones that British people love.

When I was a child, I sat next to my grandfather, in his smoke-filled stinky den while he compiled the world's greatest crossword puzzle dictionary. He would give me puzzles to solve and I became quite expert in the American style crosswords.

I became a member of the National Puzzlers League in 1974 and branched out into all kinds of mental puzzles, and discovered Cryptic Crosswords. These are the crossword puzzles that people in the British Empire enjoy solving. These employ tricky word-play. If you want to keep exercising your brain and you want to do something quite different from the normal crosswords, such as appear in most daily papers, I would highly recommend Cryptic Crosswords.

You can find these puzzles in magazines like The Nation and BBC Music. The Atlantic Monthly as well as The New Yorker used to have good ones each month, but they were dropped, apparently because there wasn't enough interest by ordinary subscribers.

British newspapers, like the Times and the Guardian publish cryptics. I hate to admit it, but I have NEVER completely finished even one of the Times cryptics. However, I have done some of the Guardians as well as ones from other British papers. BBC Music Magazine has a great music-themed cryptic each month. They are quite tough for me, but I learn something about classical music each month when I attempt to solve them. British puzzles naturally contain a lot of terms and words that Americans usually are not used to, and this makes them a bit tough, at least for me. But I love the challenge.

The cryptic in The Nation has been posed each month for years by a gentleman with a great sense of humor and a very wide knowledge of all kinds of things. I am able to solve almost all of them, but they do give my brain a workout.

Recently, the magazine THE WEEK has begun a regular crossword that is similar to a cryptic in humor and wordplay.

I have my regular puzzle "fixes". Every month, I do cryptics from The Nation, BBC Music Magazine, British newspapers, the National Puzzlers League, books from Borders, and wherever else I can find them. But I try not to ignore regular American crosswords, especially the tough ones in The Week magazine and the New York Times. (I'm sure you know that the American style puzzles in the Times start rather easily on Mondays and get progressively harder as the week progresses.)

Cryptic puzzles emply a number of different wordplay types.. such as anagrams, hidden words, charades, etc. If you haven't tried them, you are in for a mental treat.

Outside of the National Puzzlers League, I have only been acquainted with one other person who loved cryptic crosswords. His name was Chuck Adkins, and he worked for me at the Social Security Administration. Chuck was a puzzler and I got him interested in Cryptics.. and all of a sudden, he was submitting cryptic puzzles to Games Magazine. If you subscribe to that magazine, take a look at the names of the cryptics contributors, you may see a puzzle submitted by him. Even though Chuck passed away a couple of years ago, that magazine still publishes his cryptics periodically. Chuck was an amazing person and a good friend. I miss him.