Games like the NYT Mini: daily mini crosswords

The New York Times Mini is a clued five by five you race against the clock, so the closest matches are other dated 5x5 grids. For free ones, start with the newspapers. The Los Angeles Times mini is a 5x5 a day by Elizabeth C. Gorski, with the last two weeks in an archive. Slate posts a mini every morning at 6 Eastern and keeps every past one. The Boston Globe's mini is 5x5 or 7x7 and free on its games page, The Telegraph's mini is free in Telegraph Puzzles, and the Guardian posts a numbered 5x5 every day at midnight UK time. The Chicago Sun-Times, The Globe and Mail, Yahoo (made with Puzzmo), Fox News, the New York Post, Arkadium, Singapore's CNA and La Vanguardia, in English, have free daily minis too. USA TODAY's Quick Cross lets you play a limited number of puzzles free each week before asking for a Play subscription. Further afield, the Hindustan Times posts a free dated 5x5 every day and the Times of India a free timed mini whose grid shape changes daily, The Irish Times has The Daily Eight, a 7x7 grid with eight clues seven days a week, and The Indian Express and The Sydney Morning Herald, whose mini also runs in The Age, keep theirs for subscribers.

If the leaderboard is what you like about the Mini, try the Lex.Games Mini by Lex Friedman, Ponder Club's Mini 5x5 and Mind Loft's Emcee, each with a daily leaderboard. Mini·5 from doce.games makes the clock the whole game, with each hint letter costing 30 seconds, and DailyPlay's Daily Mini Crossword gives a timer, three hints and no ads. Minicrossword.com, edited by Jeff Chen, posts a Daily Easy and a Daily Hard each day, Crosshare picks one mini from its community of constructors as the Daily Mini, Pocket Grids posts a numbered 5x5 on Reddit every day, and The Observer, the student paper at Fordham Lincoln Center, posts a timed 5x5 each weekday. STAT's weekday mini leans on health and science clues.

For a twist on the format, The Washington Post's Mini Meta runs from Monday to Saturday, and by Saturday one answer from each of the first five grids gives a clue to a meta answer hidden in the last. PlusWord, for Telegraph Puzzles subscribers, has you solve a 5x5 and then use its letters to guess a hidden five-letter word. Swap from the LA Times and Shuffled give you every letter already on the board, in the wrong places. Crosswordle.org has no clues at all: each across and down word is its own small Wordle. Wordcrux ends the game when one square collects three wrong letters, and the Jumble Crossword gives each answer as scrambled letters beside its clue.

If even a mini feels long, The Nano Crossword is a 4x4 with no black squares, eight words in sixteen squares, and Newsroom's weekday mini and John Wilmes's PlayFour on GoComics (with a subscription) are 4x4 grids too. When a mini starts to feel short, The Atlantic's crossword begins mini sized on Monday and grows through the week, a gentle step towards full-size grids. Every daily mini crossword we list, in English and other languages, is on our daily mini crosswords page (/daily-mini-crosswords).