CrossEights Daily

About CrossEights Daily

CrossEights Daily, from Beyond The Fossils, is a crossword without clues. The grid is 8x8 with its corners blocked off, which leaves a cross shape holding eight words of eight letters: four across and four down. A few anchor letters are shown at the start, and from there you work out the words by filling in letters and recognising patterns. The game describes it as Wheel of Fortune meeting Sudoku.

There is one daily puzzle, the same for every player, and the difficulty follows a weekly pattern, from easy early in the week to harder ones toward the weekend. You get five hints. Points come for each correct letter, with the value falling as time passes, plus a bonus for finishing faster than the puzzle's median time and an Insight Bonus for completing a word when few of its letters were revealed. A transpose button flips the grid so the down words read across. When you finish, you see the day's leaderboard and your streak.

The words are ordinary ones, so no crossword experience or trivia is needed, and most puzzles take a few minutes. It suits players who like Waffle or clueless crosswords and enjoy a scored race. A daily puzzle only counts once per browser, and the sister site CrossEights.com has unlimited puzzles and a Rivals mode for head-to-head play.

How to play CrossEights Daily

1. Open CrossEights Daily and look at the cross-shaped grid and its anchor letters.
2. Fill in letters so that four eight-letter words read across and four read down.
3. Use a hint when stuck; you have five, and solving letters yourself scores more.
4. Press the transpose button (or the space bar) to see the down words written across.
5. Finish the eight words, then check your score, the leaderboard and your streak.

Tips

• E, A, R, S, T and N turn up in most eight-letter words, so start with them.
• Look for prefixes such as UN-, RE- and PRE- and endings such as -ING, -TION and -NESS.
• Every letter belongs to one across word and one down word, so a guess can be checked both ways.
• Try to finish a word from only a few letters: the Insight Bonus rewards it.
• Expect a gentle puzzle early in the week and a tougher one near the weekend.

Questions