The weekly difficulty curve: which puzzle to pick and when

Crossword difficulty is scheduled, not random. Most papers grade their week deliberately, and once you know the ladder you can choose a puzzle that fits the time and attention you actually have. Solving the wrong day is the commonest reason beginners decide they are bad at crosswords.

The Monday to Saturday ladder

American daily puzzles, and the New York Times crossword in particular, get harder through the week. The grids are the same size. The clues are not.

The shape of the grid tells you the day before you read a clue. Themed weekday puzzles run to roughly 76 entries, while a themeless Friday or Saturday is held under 72, which means fewer and longer answers, wider white spaces and fewer crossings to rescue you.

Sunday is bigger, not harder

The Sunday puzzle is the one most solvers misjudge. It is 21 by 21, it carries a title and a substantial theme, and it takes two or three times as long as a weekday grid. The clue difficulty sits around midweek. If a Sunday defeats you, the problem is usually stamina or theme, not vocabulary, which makes the lesson on themes and revealers the useful preparation.

The other American dailies

Not every paper ratchets up the same way. The Los Angeles Times crossword follows a similar curve a shade gentler throughout, which makes its Friday a reasonable target while a New York Times Friday is still out of reach. USA Today runs themed 15 by 15 puzzles pitched at a consistent, accessible level every day, so it is the best choice for building speed. The Wall Street Journal grades Monday to Saturday and adds a contest puzzle on Fridays, where the grid is only the first half of the task and a meta answer has to be extracted from it.

The British ladder

British papers grade by series rather than by day. The Guardian runs a Quick crossword daily with plain definition clues, a Quiptic on Mondays built as a gentle cryptic for improvers, a full daily Cryptic, a harder Prize puzzle on Saturdays and the Everyman in the Observer on Sundays, which is the friendliest full cryptic in general circulation.

At The Times the sequence runs Concise, then Quick Cryptic on weekdays, then the daily Cryptic, with a Jumbo at the weekend. The ladder to aim at is Quick crossword, then Quick Cryptic or Quiptic, then a daily cryptic, and it is worth climbing only after the lesson on how a cryptic clue is built makes sense to you.

Minis, and choosing today's puzzle

Mini crosswords, typically 5 by 5, are not small hard puzzles. They are vocabulary drills with almost no crossing help, and they are excellent for two things: keeping a habit alive on a busy day, and practising short fill. They will not teach you to finish a Saturday.

Choose by time and purpose. Twenty minutes and a wish to finish something means Monday, Tuesday or a themed daily such as the Daily Themed puzzle. An hour and a wish to learn means Thursday. Practising the same weekday every day for a fortnight measures progress better than climbing the ladder does, because the difficulty is held still while you change. Themeless, meta and Quiptic are defined in the glossary.