Play today's hard mini crossword free — tougher clues all week, a 5×5 most days and a 7×7 on weekends, edited by Jeff Chen, constructor of 150+ NYT crosswords. No account, no paywall.
Free, no account, no paywall. Today's hard mini — a tougher 5×5 most days, a 7×7 on weekends — edited by Jeff Chen, constructor of 150+ New York Times crosswords. Trickier clues, the same coffee-break spirit.
Finished the Daily Easy mini before your coffee was cool? This one's built to make you work for it. Same format — a quick grid, across and down clues, a streak worth protecting — but the clues lean on misdirection instead of hand-holding. No signup, no paywall.
Two things, and notably not the thing most "hard" puzzles lean on. Bad hard puzzles are hard because they're unfair — obscure trivia, random rare words crossing each other, the kind of grid an algorithm spits out when you crank the difficulty dial. The hard mini is hard because it's clever: clue misdirection (a "?" means wordplay, not a literal definition), trickier short fill, the occasional theme hiding in plain sight. The answers stay fair — you'll smack your forehead, not reach for a search engine. That difference comes from a human constructor building the puzzle rather than a generator cranking it out.
Like the crosswords you grew up on, the mini gets tougher as the week goes on — Monday's a gentle start and the weekend bites hardest. Most days the grid is a compact 5×5; on Saturdays and Sundays it can open up to a 7×7. The hard mini runs that same arc a step tougher throughout — so even Monday's hard has bite, and by the weekend you're getting the trickiest clues on the meatiest grid.
Every day you get two fresh dailies: the Daily Easy mini to warm up, and this one when you want a real fight. Want more? Unlimited gives you endless practice anytime, and the Archive keeps past hard minis playable — the last 7 days free, the full run back to day one with a free account.
Same rules as any mini — fill the grid so every across and down clue is answered correctly — with a few habits that matter more when the clues fight back:
Every daily mini on this site — the Daily Easy and the Daily Hard — is edited by Jeff Chen, a constructor with 150+ New York Times puzzles, hundreds more across the LA Times and Wall Street Journal, a decade of daily NYT-puzzle analysis at XWord Info, and the Sunday-crossword editorship at Andrews McMeel Universal. Will Shortz has called his puzzles "ingenious."
That's why a hard mini here is tricky rather than obscure — the difficulty is designed, not dialed up. More about Jeff.
(Unlimited puzzles are auto-generated for infinite practice; a Chen-edited Unlimited filter is on the way. For now his hands are on the two dailies — which is exactly what makes them worth coming back for.)
A few quick wins for when the clues fight back:
Harder than the daily mini, but always fair. The challenge comes from clever cluing and misdirection, not obscure trivia. If you solve the regular mini comfortably, you're ready for this one.
Clue misdirection (especially clues ending in “?”), trickier short fill, and the occasional hidden theme. A well-made hard puzzle is tough because it's clever, not because it's obscure — the difference between a constructor and an algorithm.
Most days it's a 5×5. On weekends — Saturday and Sunday — it can open up to a 7×7. Either way, the difficulty builds as the week goes on, with the toughest puzzles landing on the weekend.
Longer than the quick daily — a few minutes is normal, and weekend 7×7s run longer. New solvers might take 10 minutes; regulars settle around 2–4. The only benchmark that matters is your own yesterday.
Free forever, and no — play instantly with no signup, and the past 7 days of daily puzzles are open too. Your streak and stats save in your browser; an optional free account adds cross-device sync and unlocks the full daily archive.
Jeff Chen, constructor of 150+ New York Times crosswords, edits both daily minis — the Daily Easy and the Daily Hard.
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