Nerfracker #6
Simple … you need to obtain a gold coin (10)
Today’s Nerfracker is an homage to the late, great New Yorker cryptic crossword. These are great intermediate puzzles, in an iconic format: 10 x 8, with bars separating words instead of blocks, usually 20 to 24 clues.
The cryptics space always needs new solvers, and when the New Yorker ran these puzzles (for a few years in the 1990s and a few years in the 2020s), they were ideal gateway puzzles for people who didn’t grow up with GAMES magazine. The other long-lived cryptics in mainstream publications like The Atlantic and Harper’s were principally variety puzzles aimed at advanced solvers, and while there are a lot of feeders into the hobby, solvers often have to come to them; The New Yorker was a good example of such puzzles coming to you, when you might not know you wanted them. (We're aware that "coming to you" probably just means "being in your doctor's waiting room," but cryptics evangelism is a game of inches.)
Another source, of course, were Sundays in the New York Times, which was enough of a presence for the NYT to maintain and operate a cryptics branch of their crossword forum in those heady days of the early public internet. We arrived at the forum just after The New Yorker had stopped publishing cryptics in the ‘90s, but Teresa Cunningham and Dave McKeegan had been newbie forumites just a few years earlier than us, and had actually gotten published in The New Yorker, the sort of legendary origin story that made us think that maybe someday we could get published too.
So we're pleased to be making a puzzle in this format; we hope you will be as well. The Nerfrackers are obviously our gateway puzzles, and they're experimental in the sense that we want to determine the best way to have newcomers experience the fullness of cryptics without throwing them in the deep end. If you're trying to pick up the cryptic habit: What works for you? What did you solve that first got you interested, and which if any of the Nerfrackers has helped or hindered your journey? Not a rhetorical question, if you care to answer below or at hello@therackenfracker.com. Happy solving!