Play PlusWord now at telegraph.co.uk/plusword, where a new crossword puzzle is published every day at midnight.
2022 has seen word-finding challenges take the puzzles and crosswords world by storm. Such brainteasers have existed for years, from the decades-old game of Bulls and Cows, via the Mastermind board game of the 1970s, through to the recent Wordle craze. All have at their heart a simple code-breaking challenge: using a series of guesses to identify a series of four or five letters, numbers or colours, then being told after each guess whether each letter, number or colour is a) part of the series and b) in the correct position.
We are pleased to have launched our own word-finding game, PlusWord, which marries the challenge of a code-breaking puzzle to the content of our famous crosswords. PlusWord is easy and fast to play, and consists of a miniature version of our Quick Crossword, in which some squares are coloured; the letters in those shaded squares let you work out the additional five-letter PlusWord.
The initial concept for the game came about almost two decades ago, in the form of a cryptic crossword compiled for some friends, in which a group of cells in the middle of the grid acted as a further puzzle in which a number of coloured cells led to a Wordle-style challenge.
