Play PlusWord daily, the Telegraph’s free online word puzzle

Play PlusWord now telegraph.co.uk/pluswordwhere a new crossword is published every day at midnight.

In 2022, word finding challenges have taken the puzzle and crossword world by storm. Brain teasers like this have been around for years, from the decades-old game Bulls and Cows to the 1970s mastermind board game to the recent Wordle craze. All of them love a simple code-breaking challenge: use a series of guesses to identify a series of four or five letters, numbers, or colors, and then after each guess tell whether each letter, number, or color is a ) part of the code is series and b) in the correct position.

We’re excited to launch our very own word-finding game, PlusWord, which combines the challenge of a code-breaking puzzle with the content of our famous crossword puzzles. Easy and fast to play, PlusWord consists of a miniature version of our quick crossword in which some squares are colored; Using the letters in these shaded squares, you can calculate the additional five-letter plus word.

The original concept for the game came about almost two decades ago in the form of a cryptic crossword put together for some friends, in which a cluster of cells in the center of the grid served as another puzzle, with a series of colored cells leading to a challenge in Wordle style.