James Law's Game Of The Year Was... Crosswords | Winter Spectacular 2023
Welcome to my startmenu Winter Spectacular piece. See if you can solve my puzzle of the year. The solutions for the below crossword can be found throughout the piece. I hope you enjoy.
6 Across - ODES
Back when I worked at Gamer Network's offices, writing guides for Call of Duty and Hearthstone, I met some of my closest friends. We'd come in every morning, stand by the coffee machine, brew up a volcanically strong batch of the stuff, and chat nonsense for a bit. It made those cold winter mornings, walking along the blustering Brighton coast, that bit more bearable.
Speaking of Call of Duty, here’s another fun puzzle.
It was here I first got into crosswording. Some nattering must've turned to the subject and I found myself doing a quick crossword on some newspaper's website, clearly suckered in by the offer of a free trial.
This blossomed into friendly competition - Joel Fagliano's NYT Mini crossword being an office favourite. We'd time ourselves and see who solved today's clues quickest, posting our scores in the dedicated Slack channel. It'd go dormant for a few days before someone chimed in:
"0:43"
In the subsequent minutes, times flood in. I, embarrassed, respond to this flurry, "1:21". I blame an America-centric reference I didn't get. That's how it goes. Sometimes it just clicks, other times you sit frustrated, waiting for your brain to figure out elusive synonyms for 'erroneous'.
Why the crossword in 2023, though? It's years later, I work from my bedroom, and honestly, I don't even puzzle with the same group anymore. We play Fortnite instead.
5 Across - BETAS
Late this year, a brand-new source for word gamers everywhere dropped in limited beta. To get in, you had to be one of the first 500 people to enter the site on a given day and solve a puzzle, giving you a key. I'm an absolute sucker for artificial scarcity, so you'd best bet I signed up for email alerts and jumped online as soon as the gates for new players opened.
Puzzmo got me back on the horse and then some. Orta Therox and Zach Gage's project is designed to be the newspaper puzzle pages and nothing but, to be visited by appointment daily (or whenever you fancy). I won't bore you with a review of everything the platform has to offer, but the games are fun. Mostly word games, there's some visually satisfying click-based fun along with Gage's previous outing, Really Bad Chess, available. It's good.
4 Down - REDO
And still, months later, what do I most regularly return to? That gorgeous little grid. It keeps coming back. Word game innovation is amazing and can really capture society's imagination (looking at you, Wordle), but for me, you just can't beat the classic crossword.
It was a 'gentle' crossword today, on an 11x11 grid. Clues like 'Dough that's inedible? [5]' and 'Capital of Taiwan [6]' didn't keep me stumped for long.
Crosswords soothe my brain. It's like getting a back scratch on the inside of my head. Actually, that sounds kinda gross. I've tried to figure out what it is about them that makes me feel so good. It's hard to put my finger on.
It's nice to accomplish something at the start of my day, I guess. No matter how bad a day I have at work, or how uninspired and demotivated I find myself, I've still figured something out. I've succeeded. Even if it's a particularly tough one I need to use extra hints on, we take those.
In fact, I can look back on my Puzzmo history and see the days I haven't done the crossword. Those tend to be the worst days. Bit of a chicken-egg scenario, sure. The correlation stands, though. When I solve, I feel better.
2 Down - ALAS
Another theme for my year has been my journey to finally receiving a diagnosis and treatment for my ADHD. It took AGES, but it's done. Things were way better in general. Symptoms were reduced, side effects were managed, and on the whole, I felt normal. That was weird.
Around the time I started to get used to the new way of thinking, I heard the news that the suppliers of my ADHD treatment had run out. Just completely run out. No warning, no one walked into a warehouse of pills and saw it growing emptier and emptier. Nothing.
In a situation like this, there isn't a lot to be done. Diluting the rest of the meds into smaller doses so they last a tiny bit longer was really the only option. It was lonely. There are tons of problems in the world, and the perception of ADHD is still pretty negative - like people get diagnosed because it's fashionable or something. I spoke to a publication about the shortage to get some of my thoughts out there, but in general, things felt indefinitely bleak.
I found comfort in crosswords. The ritual of it all, the feeling of getting something, anything done, was the torch showing me the way through. I wasn't broken, I was deprived of healthcare, and would get through this one day at a time.
No other game comes close.
3 Down - TLs
When you think of someone doing a crossword, do you think of an old man on the rocking chair, chewing a pencil (or pen, if he's hard as nails) while mulling over dog breeds that might fit into nine letters and end in 'N'? Maybe you think of Inspector Morse, desperately trying to finish a grid before pulling into Oxford Railway Station.
Editor’s note: he’s no Columbo let’s be real…
The truth is, crosswording is inherently for all. When you grab the Metro before jumping on the tube or log in to your favourite puzzle website, countless others are going through exactly what you're going through. Umming and ahhing over actors' surnames and country flag colours, searching the far reaches of their brains for idioms and nursery rhymes to draw from, and chuckling when they find out that the clue "Shit eater [3]" is answered by "RIM".
I love going into the forums of all these crosswords, comparing notes with others and seeing where we differ.
Once you're really into it, you start getting to understand the specific setters and the vibe of their clues. You form a sort of parasocial relationship with a pseudonym, nodding your head and cracking a rye smile when you take a shortcut to the answer by way of just knowing this setter. There are people I feel so close to yet if we passed each other in the street, neither of us would bat an eye.
It's another world. A community where everyone knows everyone and no one knows anyone.
5 Down - BOG
I took a week off of work to rest my weary brain and walk through some muddy fields. I saw some ducks, too. It was lovely.
My next mission was to have a wander around the National Gallery. Now, I'm no art historian, so I rang up a friend - someone I have to shout out for lighting the way further into the crossword cave. Christian Donlan (you can read his work over at Eurogamer) is a fountain of joy and worldly knowledge.
With his guidance, I had a wonderful tour around the National. Diego Velázquez is a favourite - the Rokeby Venus had been replaced for repairs so it was fascinating to see the placeholder surrounded by the Spaniard's true work. Upon mentioning my crossword fascination, we got into the meat of the subject.
A conversation with Donlan will always leave you with a lightened heart. The other thing it'll leave you with is a book recommendation (The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming is an absolute banger if you want to learn more about Velázquez).
Throughout the year, I'd become obsessed with crosswords, but had always shied away from the quirkier side of crosswording. I'd never touched a cryptic. It all seemed so unapproachable. Donlan's recommendation was the nudge I needed to take the plunge.
1 Across - VAT
The book he recommended is Two Girls, One On Each Knee [7] by Alan Connor. It contains pretty much the entire history of the crossword, from the first-ever puzzle to famous fans through the ages. It has a chapter going through exactly how to figure out each clue. There's a contents page that doubles as a crossword. Even the title of the book is a clue - can you figure it out?
I'm in far deeper than I ever imagined.
4 Across - ROLL
Don't get me wrong, I'm still early on my journey into the world of cryptic crosswording. I'm still hitting up the 'quick cryptic' pages - the big-boy puzzles will have to wait for now. My training awaits.
It promises to be a wondrous journey, though. The feeling of figuring out a cryptic clue is like normal but multiplied by a hundred. It's like completing a half-marathon you trained hard for. I grew these brain muscles, and they WORK!
What excites me even more is the fact that there are cryptic setters I'm yet to meet. Ones I'll become close parasocial friends with once I learn their domain. People whose pseudonyms are feared by solvers across the world, and whose devious minds I get to experience for the first time.
1 Down - VOTED
Crosswords are my game of the year. I loved what Tears of the Kingdom did to build on its predecessor. I've spent countless hours on Baldur's Gate 3. I'm even grateful for Fortnite for the excuse it gives me to talk shit with friends.
But nothing has made such a consistent and clear improvement to my life like the crossword.
7 Across - GOD
In some ways, those of us who love gaming have a lot to thank it for. Way back in 1924, the Times published a piece entitled "An Enslaved America", lamenting the chokehold crosswording had over the US population.
The pastime had exploded in popularity across the pond. The Times claimed over 5 million man-hours were being lost daily to crosswords. Workers were failing their daily tasks in an attempt to figure out why their answer to ten across didn't match with the letters from five down. The Tamworth Herald claimed puzzles were a leading cause of the downfall of the family, with husbands preferring to leaf through dictionaries than go out and put food on the table. We were shit scared of the downfall of the Protestant work ethic, destroyed by miniature black-and-white boxes.
So thank you, humble crossword. Thank you for allowing the wider public to have a bit of fun. Video Games have been tarred with the broad brush of moral panic in recent years, and whatever comes next inevitably will be too.
Leisure time is more important now than ever, and the crossword is one of its original pioneers. Perhaps it's a coincidence that the five-day working week was first instituted in 1926, shortly after newspapers began fearmongering about the grid's popularity. Perhaps not.
Maybe, then, it's a delicious irony that crosswords have become such an irreplaceable feature of the publications that once feared them. Yeah, I'll go with that.
