Cross Atlantic

Introducing Cross Atlantic, our brand new US-style crossword

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And now there’s Cross Atlantic, too. It is that rare treat: a new puzzle, to be published every weekend and daily online, in our own Telegraph, a newspaper that knows a thing or two about the genre, having delivered its first crossword to readers almost a century ago, years before Fleet Street rivals cottoned on. The name of the new game gives a hint of its origins: American crosswords whose clues engagingly blend wordplay, odd definitions, colloquialisms, general knowledge and current affairs, stretching and testing the brain without the forbidding challenge that the cryptic grid presents to the uninitiated (and which, in the 1940s, prompted Bletchley Park to use the Telegraph crossword as a test to recruit new code-breakers).

Here, says The Telegraph’s Dan Silver, in charge of the new project, is a game that will give the successful solver that small yet potent glow of pride in their achievement, while being fun and accessible, too. It will not require being steeped in the lore of the game, but will plumb the depths of recall and knowledge, and hopefully do you a bit of good along the way.

‘We’ve been working with academics and scientists to identify the behaviour that promotes brain health,’ says Silver. Telegraph Puzzles Editor Chris Lancaster notes that research suggests solving is ‘good for exercising your brain. Puzzles probably can’t stop the onset of dementia, but keeping mentally active may contribute to people being affected only later, or more slowly.’ A happy distraction that may actually be good for you: what’s not to like? Of course, while Cross Atlantic looks across the ocean for inspiration, it is resolutely British in the detail of its clues and solutions, exploring our culture, language, general knowledge and mores. This is a crossword, says Silver, ‘wearing a bowler hat, carrying a briefcase, with a rolled-up umbrella under its arm. It has a British accent. All of the references are British.’ Assembled by the country’s best compilers, it will have, he says, ‘a real British twist, with that sense of fun and character’. No other British newspaper regularly offers anything like it.

But then, pioneering puzzles have long been the norm for The Telegraph. It was on 30 July 1925 that the paper published its first crossword, stitching together clues in a more overtly symmetrical pattern than we are familiar with today, the result being a thin constellation of black squares that resembles a pixelated space invader from an early video game. Those 1920s clues were very insistently of their age, and played to establishment educations: answers depended on a familiarity with Byron and cricket and the classical world. Some of those last-century clues look, to this solver’s eye, particularly unhelpful. ‘Shakespeare character’ for example, does little to narrow the field. But such was the nature of the more open grid crosswords featured then. For such teasers, near impossible with no helpful letters from already solved clues, become a doddle with neighbouring clues supplying nearly all of them. That will be a feature of Cross Atlantic too, which has far fewer black squares than a conventional British crossword.

The 1925 grid has other hints to the style of today’s new game. ‘A word from the motto of the Garter’ was one first-day clue, all those 97 years ago. Back then, no doubt, such things were everyday knowledge. Today, many Telegraph readers will still find the Anglo-Norman words trip off their tongues. But many more will know the motto in question – Honi soit qui mal y pense – from having been glued to their screen for this year’s mournful royal ceremonials after the death of the late Queen. In this spirit, the new puzzle will bend and flex before great moments, as they happen. Coronations and Grand Nationals, wartime Remembrance or Christmas celebrations may inspire setters and infuse the grid.

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With the new puzzle joining a stable of games from the ‘Mini’ – a new 5x5 crossword – to the Toughie – an established super-hard cryptic – there will be something for everyone, expert or dabbler. The beginner may find themselves hooked and stay on, trying out ever-harder puzzles. The genius of Cross Atlantic is the diversity in its clues which, while never formally cryptic, will get readers thinking laterally. ‘As one does to an unfit boiler’ runs one in the opening puzzle. I won’t tell you the answer, but it’s a play on words that gets the mind moving just as far and fast as any Toughie, yet which everyone will know.

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Source:

The Telegraph (November 21, 2022)