The British Figured Out the Perfect Kind of Crossword. Where You At, Americans?

Stephen Sondheim is credited with introducing cryptic crosswords to the U.S. in the 1960s .

The New Yorker discontinued its cryptic crossword last year , but you can still find the archive online.

Cryptic crosswords are crosswords that look like a regular crossword but need to be solved in a complex way.

Cryptic crosswords take a lot longer than your average general-knowledge or synonym-based puzzle.

They're fun because they’re difficult and require learning the rules of the game.

The key is to ignore the literal meaning of the clue.

Different people click with different setters and difficulty levels.

The point was for us to do this thing together, as we have done many times before, to turn the words over in our minds and see if we could wring some sense from them as a team. I’m lucky that my dad and I don’t violently disagree on too many things and we reliably find things to talk about. But perhaps a puzzle, one that takes time to learn and time to think over, is a nice thing to do with someone in your life with whom conversation doesn’t always flow as naturally as you’d like..