A 2026 gift guide for the guy who does the daily puzzles

Here's a wishlist for the guy who does a sudoku, a Wordle and a Minute Cryptic every day. Pick the items you want with "Add to wishlist," or take the whole list with the button at the bottom:

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Cryptics, a minute at a time

Minute Cryptic is one cryptic crossword clue a day, with no grid. It was started by Angas Tiernan, who lives in Melbourne and explains each clue in a short video. The book is by Tiernan and Liam Runnalls, an Australian setter who has written cryptics professionally since 2012. Each chapter covers one kind of wordplay, and the later chapters combine them, so by the end you're working toward a full cryptic crossword. It was an instant Sunday Times bestseller in the UK and came out in the US from St. Martin's Griffin in December 2025.

Wordle and the rest of the daily games

Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, made Wordle for his partner, who liked word games, and put it online in October 2021. On November 1 it had 90 players. About two months later it had 300,000, and in January 2022 The New York Times bought it for a price in the "low-seven figures".

Wordle is still free, and so are Connections, Strands and the Times sudoku. A Games subscription adds the daily crossword, the Mini, the full Spelling Bee and an archive of more than 10,000 crosswords. Gift subscriptions run 12 months and are a one-time payment. He can't redeem it if he already has a Games subscription.

Puzzmo is Zach Gage's daily puzzle site, now owned by Hearst Newspapers. Gage also made Really Bad Chess and SpellTower, and both are on Puzzmo, along with a crossword, Typeshift, Pile-Up Poker and others. There's also a $3.99 monthly plan.

Wordle: The Party Game is Hasbro's tabletop version for 2-4 players. One player writes a secret word, everyone else guesses on dry-erase boards, and the host marks each guess with green and yellow tiles. You score the number of tries it took you, and the lowest total wins.

Sudoku

Maki Kaji, who founded the Japanese puzzle publisher Nikoli, gave sudoku its name. It's short for a phrase that translates to "numbers should be single, a bachelor."

Thomas Snyder won the World Sudoku Championship in 2007, 2008 and 2011 and the World Puzzle Championship in 2018, and he has chemistry degrees from Caltech and Harvard. The Art of Sudoku was the first book from his company, Grandmaster Puzzles: 120 puzzles he made by hand instead of by computer.

Cracking the Cryptic is a YouTube channel started in 2017 by Simon Anthony, a former member of the UK's sudoku and puzzle championship teams, and Mark Goodliffe, who has won the Times Crossword Championship 14 times. It has more than 700,000 subscribers. In 2020 Simon solved Mitchell Lee's "Miracle" sudoku on the channel, and the video passed a million views. The puzzle starts with only two digits on the grid and adds chess rules: no two cells a knight's or king's move apart can hold the same digit. The channel's app has a free variety pack, and the variant puzzle packs are sold inside it.

A deduction game

Turing Machine is a board game from Le Scorpion Masqué about cracking a three-digit code. You pick the punch cards for your three digits and stack them on a verification card, and what shows through the holes tells you whether the guess passes that card's rule. It plays with one to four people, and the companion site has more than 7 million generated problems and a daily challenge.

Something to write with

The Blackwing 602 came out in 1934. John Steinbeck praised it, and after it was discontinued in 1998, used ones sold for around $40 a pencil on eBay until Palomino brought the line back. The 602 is the firm one, and the slogan on the side is "Half the pressure, twice the speed."

A crossword about him

Lexicon Devil makes custom crosswords. For a full 15x15 grid, you talk through ideas and answers about the person, and the price includes two rounds of edits. A smaller 9x9 to 11x11 is $125.

A weekend of crosswords

Will Shortz started the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 1978, and it's the oldest and largest crossword tournament in the US. First-timers compete in a Rookie Division, and the top three solvers in the top divisions solve the final on a giant grid on stage while the audience watches. After decades in Connecticut, the 2027 tournament moves to the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown, April 30 to May 2. It's eight puzzles, scored on accuracy and speed, and registration opens January 1 at noon Eastern. There's also a play-by-mail option for solving from home.

In conclusion

The list above copies straight into a new WishPoster list with the Notebook Paper theme. Or start one from scratch and let him fill it in.