1 Across: Name the place where puzzles have found a new home
We’ve been piecing them together for centuries, passing them on via birch bark, manuscripts, newspapers. HT puzzles editor Kabir Firaque traces the boom online.
For several decades, they have come folded into the newspapers. A crossword or sometimes two, perhaps one cryptic and the other quick. A bunch of anagrams with circled letters in each word leading to a final bonus anagram. And the relatively recent sudoku, which started appearing in newspapers about 20 years ago.
New generations, and many among the old, are now going online to fill in a crossword, solve an anagram or crack a sudoku grid. And it’s quite the rage: The New York Times, which famously bought the game-changing pandemic puzzle Wordle for a seven-figure sum, has reported that in the first quarter of 2024, new subscriptions for non-news products (which include Games) outnumbered new subscriptions for core news.
It was inevitable, of course, that puzzling would go online, and flourish. If there is anything a user likes spending their time and attention on, the internet will find a way to take it to them. And puzzling is something people have enjoyed for centuries.
Ancient mathematical amusements date as far back as 5th-century-BCE China. These included versions of magic squares (where each row, column and diagonal in a nine-square grid must add up to the same number) and tangrams (a set of seven tiles, each a different shape, which must be rearranged into various other two-dimensional shapes).
On the Indian subcontinent, the earliest puzzles that left behind clues date to the 3rd or 4th century CE. The Bakhshali, a birch bark manuscript discovered in Peshawar in 1881, is full of mathematical diversions.
If we wanted to put a date to the beginning of modern puzzling, the 19th century would be an ideal candidate. Some of the diversions of those days remain on offer. Anyone who has ever solved a jigsaw puzzle can relate to the pleasure our 19th-century counterparts would have derived from the experience. Jigsaws originated in England in the 18th century as a teaching aid for school students, before being marketed to a wider audience about a century later.
The 15 Puzzle, in which one slides 15 tiles marked with the numbers 1 to 15 around a 4×4 frame until one gets all 15 numbers in order, has been around since 1880.
Bit by bit
If the internet has brought us newer options, it has also imposed restrictions. The realm of mathematical, word and logic puzzles, where one racks the brain to derive (not guess) the solution, has many classics that bear repetition. Their solutions, however, are all over the internet, so presenting them to a wide audience can be futile unless the setter can find ways to adapt them into an unrecognisable form.
There were no such restrictions in the 19th century, when the print media first presented puzzles to readers. Two of the pioneers were the Englishman Henry Ernest Dudeney and his American counterpart Sam Loyd. They collaborated occasionally, but largely contributed to separate magazines and each came to be recognised as his country’s foremost puzzler.
Before them, there was Lewis Carroll who, when not writing about Alice, was teaching mathematics at Oxford using his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. As Carroll, he invented the game we know as Word Ladders, in which one changes one letter per step, in a given word, until one reaches another word that has been set as the goal.
Between 1880 and 1885, Carroll also contributed a series of mathematical puzzles to The Monthly Packet magazine, with readers writing back with solutions that were then published in subsequent editions. This is a form that the late journalist Mukul Sharma emulated in his column Mindsport in The Illustrated Weekly of India in the 1980s and ’90s. It is also the form followed by my weekly column, Problematics, in the Hindustan Times.
Between Carroll and the present came the crossword. The first one in a newspaper was published in New York World in 1913, by the English journalist Arthur Wynne. Several American newspapers soon started a daily crossword, followed by the first one in England, in the Sunday Express, in 1924.
A century on, the crossword is a feature of most English-language newspapers around the world. Many still solve it in the morning paper, but the online version (the NYT crossword was the first, in 1996) does make a difference. One can solve it on the go, and need not wait for the next morning to know how one scored.
New clues
It was not the crossword, however, that would be the turning point in online puzzling. This came when Wordle solvers started sharing their scores on social media, in those strange empty days of the pandemic.
This inevitably set off explorations that opened the door to other online puzzles, including Wordle spinoffs. (Click here to read about Absurdle, Queerdle, Letterle and others.)
So, what’s next?
Most online puzzles require the player to fill keyboard characters into designated slots. We have not yet reached the stage where we could engage online in all the diversions that amused pen-and-paper users two centuries ago. Yes, one can solve crosswords and jigsaws online, but can one do the same with an old-style mathematical poser? Or an Einstein puzzle, in which some people live in houses of a certain colour and own certain pets? How does one enter who owns the zebra?
Wait and watch. Online puzzling is evolving, including in this newsroom. If there’s anything you like doing, the internet will find a way to bring it to you.
