Mini Crossword (minicrossword.com)

The Mini Crossword is a small daily crossword you can finish on a coffee break. Each puzzle has a number and a title (number 127 on 26 October 2026 was Sleight of Hand), a compact grid and a handful of across and down clues. On weekdays the grid is 5x5. On Saturdays and Sundays it can grow to 7x7, and as with a newspaper crossword it starts gentle on Monday and gets tougher toward the weekend.

The daily puzzles are edited by Jeff Chen, a constructor with more than 150 puzzles in The New York Times and many more in the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. For ten years he wrote the daily NYT puzzle analysis at XWord Info. Beside the Daily Easy there is a Daily Hard mini with its own title, also under his editing. The site belongs to Hey, Good Game, the small studio behind Squeezy, Pair Down and Wordplete.

You can play with no account. A timer runs as you solve and can be paused. Check and Reveal work on a square, a word or the whole grid, and your streak and stats are kept in the browser. The last seven days of dailies are open to everyone, and a free account opens the full archive and keeps your stats across devices. Unlimited offers auto-generated grids for practice, and the site links to a larger Midi crossword.

It suits anyone who likes the NYT Mini format and wants a free alternative with carefully edited clues. The site carries display ads beside and above the grid.