How to play Mini
The newspaper mini: a five-by-five crossword, a handful of clues, and a clock that starts on your first tap. One grid a day, on the second shelf, outside the daily line-up.
Play today's Mini · Watch the gameplay demo
The rules
- Fill every white square so that each row and each column reads as the word its clue describes. Every letter belongs to two words, one across and one down.
- Tap a square to pick it. The bar under the grid shows the clue for the word it is in; the arrows on the bar walk through every clue in turn.
- Tap the same square again to switch between across and down.
- Type and the cursor moves on by itself. Delete backs up. On a physical keyboard the arrows move, space turns, and Tab jumps to the next word.
- Check grid marks any letters that are wrong, and costs points. Reveal word fills in the word you are on, costs more, and asks first so that one mistap cannot spend it.
- The puzzle is solved when every square is right. Your board is saved as you go, so a refresh is not a second attempt; the archive holds every past day.
Solving a small grid
- Read every clue before you type anything. There are only ten or so, and the two or three you know cold are the ones to enter first. A mini is won on the crossings those give you, not on the hardest clue.
- The grid shape changes daily. Some days every row is a full five; other days black squares carve it into threes and fours. Short words are the easiest to get from their crossings, so when a long one stalls, fill the short ones around it and come back.
- A clue that seems to be about one kind of thing is often about another. "Bank" is a river's edge as often as a place for money. If the obvious answer does not fit the crossings, the crossings are right.
- Count the letters before you commit. A word that is one letter too long has cost more than one player their clean grid.
- Think before you spend. Two minutes of thinking are free, and a minute after that costs about seven points; a reveal costs fifteen. Working a stuck word out from its crossings is nearly always the cheaper route.
- Check only when the grid is full. A check marks every wrong letter at once, so one check over a finished grid tells you more than three along the way.
Scoring
A solve starts at 100. The first two minutes are free; after that the clock costs a point for every eight seconds, up to forty. Each check costs six, up to twenty-four, and each reveal fifteen, up to sixty. A solve is never worth less than five. So a clean grid in under two minutes is 100, a clean grid in four minutes is 85, and a four-minute grid with one check and one reveal is 64. Mini sits outside the daily line-up, so its score never moves your day’s total.
Full details on how scoring works.