The original daily puzzle, back on schedule
Long before streaks were a genre, before anyone shared a grid of little coloured squares, the daily puzzle had a name: the newspaper. A fresh crossword beside the comics, every single morning, for a century. This page is that tradition with the paper removed — one shared mini a day, the same five-by-five for everyone, gone at midnight.
- 1 shared grid a day — identical for every player
- 5 grid shapes rotating through the week
- 0 accounts needed — streaks live on your device
The oldest daily habit in puzzles
Newspapers worked out the daily-puzzle formula in the 1920s, when crossword syndication swept from New York across the world's press: give readers something finite, print the answer tomorrow, and replace it with a new one every day. That contract — everyone gets the same puzzle, it can be finished, and it expires — turned the crossword into a shared morning ritual decades before anyone said "daily challenge." Commuters compared half-finished grids on trains; solvers wrote in to complain about unfair clues, together. The app-store dailies of the last decade didn't invent that loop. They rediscovered it.
How today's grid gets built
There's no puzzle waiting on a server. Four things happen in your browser the moment this page opens.
- Today's date becomes a number. Not a random one — the same date always produces the same number, which is the entire trick.
- That number seeds the generator — the same one behind our endless minis. Because the seed is the date, every browser in the world deals the identical grid, clues and all, with nothing coordinating them.
- One of five grid shapes takes its turn — two staircase corners and three waffle patterns, rotating day by day, so the board itself has a weekly rhythm.
- The fill comes from the hand-curated clue database shared with the rest of the crossword hub. The puzzle turns over at midnight your time, so it always matches the date on your calendar.
The rules, plainly
A streak is only worth defending if the rules are honest, so here they are. Solving the day's puzzle on its own day extends your streak. Check is fair game — it marks wrong letters and costs you nothing, though a solve without a single check earns a purist trophy and a little ✨ on your shared result. Reveal is the line: revealing a word or the grid voids the day. Even then you're not condemned — clear it and solve honestly from scratch and the day is yours again. Past days solved from the calendar count in your totals and toward monthly trophies, but never your streak; a streak means showed up daily, not caught up eventually. And everything — history, streaks, trophies — lives in your browser, on your device. Nothing is sent anywhere, which also means clearing your browser data clears your record.
Racing a mini
A five-by-five rewards momentum more than brilliance.
- Never stare If an answer doesn't arrive in a beat, move on. In a grid this small the crossings will hand it to you on the second pass, and stopping to think is where the seconds go.
- Sweep the acrosses first Type through every across clue before you look at a single down. When you do switch, half the letters are already sitting there waiting for you.
- Deduce the last square The final empty cell is almost always a letter you can work out faster than you can second-guess it. Watch the clock only once you're there.
- Decide about Check beforehand It's free time-wise and marks wrong letters honestly — but the purist trophy only goes to solvers who never ask. Pick your game before the clock starts.
Beyond the daily
When one a day isn't enough, the endless mini deals unlimited 5×5s with the same fair clues — perfect practice laps between dailies — and the micro compresses the whole thing into 3×3 and 4×4. Running a second streak? The daily word search plays by exactly the same rules — one shared grid, its own calendar and trophy room. Every other crossword page here builds printable PDF packs too — the midi is the one-grid-per-page classic — and the crossword maker turns your own words into one. See you tomorrow.