Play Plus Get Now on telegraph.co.uk/pluswordwhere a new crossword puzzle is published every day at midnight.
In 2022, word search challenges have taken the world of puzzles and crosswords by storm. Such brain teasers have been around for years, from the decades-old game Bulls and Cows, through the 1970s Mastermind board game, to the recent Word craze. All of them have a simple challenge of breaking codes: using a series of guesses to identify a sequence of four or five letters, numbers or colors, and after each guess hear whether each letter, number or color a) is part of the series and b) in the correct position.
We are delighted to have launched our very own word search game PlusWord, which combines the challenge of a code-breaking puzzle with the content of our famous crossword puzzles. PlusWord is easy and fast to play, and consists of a miniature version of our Quick Crossword, in which some squares are colored; the letters in those shaded squares let you work out the extra five-letter PlusWord.
The original concept for the game came about almost two decades ago, in the form of a cryptic crossword composed for some friends, in which a group of cells in the middle of the grid acted as a further puzzle in which a number of colored cells led to a challenge in Word -style.