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Posted on by Paul

Instant feedback

I used to consider crossword puzzles a waste of time, but now that I’ve got lots of time to waste, I enjoy them.

Instant feedback on an iPad: black letters are correct, red ones are wrong.
Courtesy bestcrosswords.com

I was never crazy about newspaper crossword puzzles. Too much erasing and let’s-try-this, sometimes looking for the answer page to cheat, or worse, having to turn the puzzle page upside-down to see the answers. With instant feedback, when  you enter a wrong letter it shows up in red, meaning keep trying, or come back later when the neighborhood is better populated.

I wanted something to kill time while giving my brain something to do besides read and watch television. I Googled for best crosswords online. The  top result was a site called bestcrosswords.com. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but there are companies on the internet claiming to be “the best” at something that actually are not. These guys are.

They have lots of high-quality, free puzzles and they add more every day. If you’re the sort of person who cheats, just click/tap “Reveal letter” or “Reveal word” – it’s up to you. Personally, I’m not going to spend an hour looking up or trying to remember “The instrument George played on Norwegian Wood“. (I cheated, it was the SITAR.)

You can solve for free. If you like the site, for $4.95 a month you can get rid of the ads, save your settings between sessions, and more. I won’t list every feature; go over there and look around. I don’t get a commission on this, I just happen to like the site.

The site’s puzzle writers have different personalities. My favorite is Barb Olson, who is Canadian and writes puzzles that are fun and interesting, and on occasion Canada-centric. At first these annoyed me, but I’m learning a lot about Canada. Right now I’m learning the province names from left to right – there’s British Columbia, Alberta, some other ones, then Nova Scotia.

I don’t know any prime ministers or hockey stars or famous Mounties, but it’s fun trying to fill in their names from the words that cross them. Canadian surnames are pretty vanilla, and there seem to be only about twenty or thirty of them, so “Smith”, “Wilson” and “McKenzie” are always good guesses.

A Barb Olson puzzle last year had a clue “Explosive that can ruin a dinner party”, with solution FBOMB. I recently looked in the archives for a copy to send someone, but it had been disappeared.

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