Crack the clues to name the tunes. One puzzle a day, a handful of cryptic tiles, and one answer hiding behind them.
Cryptune is a daily music word puzzle. Every day at midnight a new puzzle appears, the same puzzle for every player everywhere. The puzzle is a row of clue tiles. Each tile hides a single word. Work out the words, put them in order, and you have the name of an artist, a song or an album.
The whole game rests on one idea borrowed from cryptic crosswords: a clue never says what it means. "Freeze" is not asking you about temperature, it is pointing at the word COLD. "Act on stage" is pointing at PLAY. Put those two together and you have COLDPLAY, which is the answer, and which was never mentioned anywhere.
A puzzle with one tile is a single word answer, so the whole puzzle rests on a single clue. A puzzle with five tiles is a five word answer, and although each individual clue is usually gentler, holding all five in your head at once is its own challenge.
You start on 100 points and the only direction is down. Nothing you do adds points back, so the score is really a record of how much help you needed.
Your score can never drop below 1, so a puzzle you struggle with for twenty minutes is not punished any harder than one you struggle with for five. At the end you get a star rating: 100 is five stars, 75 or more is four, 55 or more is three, 35 or more is two, and anything below that is one.
Worth knowing before you start: the clock only starts when you begin the puzzle, not when the page loads. You can read the clues, think about them, and get your head straight before anything starts ticking.
Every tile belongs to one of six families. Recognising which family you are looking at is most of the battle, because it tells you what kind of thinking to apply.
The clue means the same thing as the hidden word. "Deep affection" gives LOVE. "Extremely serious" gives DIRE. This is by far the most common type in Cryptune, so it is the sensible first assumption for any tile.
The clue is the word, taken exactly as it stands. A tile reading "we" hides the word WE. These usually turn up as the small connecting words in longer titles, and they are free points once you spot them.
The clue means the reverse of the hidden word. If the tile suggests cold, the answer is heat. Read these too quickly and you will confidently write down the exact opposite of what you need.
The clue points at a word that sounds like the hidden word but is not spelled like it. "Lots of" gives LOTTA. These are the ones to try when a synonym almost works but the spelling feels wrong, and they are common in song titles because songwriters have never respected spelling.
A twist rather than a definition. The clue might split a word in two, bury it inside another word, or lean on a double meaning. There is no single method here, which is exactly what makes these the most satisfying tiles to crack unaided.
The letters of the hidden word, rearranged. The rarest type in the game and, for a lot of players, the favourite. If a clue looks like nonsense, count the letters before assuming it is nonsense.
New to cryptic clues? The Cryptune clue school takes each clue type in turn and works through real examples from the game.
Missed a day? Every puzzle that has already been published stays available in the archive, reachable from the menu. Archive puzzles are scored the same way, and solving one will not repair a broken streak, but they are there whenever you want more than one puzzle in a sitting.
Cryptune keeps track of how many days in a row you have solved the daily puzzle, along with your best streak and your average score. All of it is stored in your own browser, which means it belongs to you and to the device you are playing on. There are no accounts and no logins, so nothing follows you from your phone to your laptop. For a small daily puzzle that felt like the right trade.
Play today's puzzle