Telegraph v. Times – a crossword website comparison

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Announcement
This is a quick comparison of the UK’s two pay sites for broadsheet cryptic crosswords, following recent changes at the Times Crossword Club site, and a change of name for the Telegraph one – now “Telegraph Puzzles” rather than “CluedUp”.

Times Crossword Club Telegraph Puzzles
Cost £24.99 p.a. or £4.95 for one month £2.99 per month (=£35.85 p.a.)
Cryptic crosswords each week 7 daily cryptics
1 Jumbo
1 Mephisto
1 Listener
1 Times Lit Supp
1 Club Special (monthly)
Clue-writing comp (monthly)		 7 daily cryptics
4 Toughies
1 Enigmatic Variations
1 club cryptic
Other crosswords each week 7 daily concise puzzles
1 T2 Jumbo 		7 daily concise puzzles
1 Saturday “GK quick”
GK and quick weekly club puzzles
3 General knowledge (including one “giant” and Monday “Herculis”)
Other puzzles each week None Codeword (print only) – one a day I think
Sudoku (online or print) 11 a week
Kakuro (print only) 5 a week
Mind Gym (maths – print only) 5 a week
Online solving Pretty good interface – plenty of clues visible, font size variable. Choice of whether to count puzzle towards leaderboard score or not (useful if you’ve done the puzzle on paper and want to enter the prize draw. Couple of quirks like no automatic selection of the first blank space when you jump to an answer with checking letters written in. Mephisto and Listener not solvable online. OK interface – irritating inability to choose across/down clues at intersections – e.g. 1D rather than 1A when cursor is in top left square. Rather poky boxes for displaying clues, next to a very large grid. No choice of font size. EV not solvable online.
Leaderboards Individual top 100 leaderboards for each online puzzle, showing time, number of errors, and a points score – up to 600 points for correct answers, and up to 300 added for beating the time limit, only if solution is all-correct. 30-day (days of solving – including old puzzles) average leaderboards for the “concise” and “cryptic” categories, with 10 puzzles in the category as qualification for inclusion. Individual puzzle leaderboards are ideal, 30-day ones are a reasonable compromise given all sorts of issues in trying to combine scores. No hints available until solution has been made public. Individual leaderboards for today’s puzzle only. Combined leaderboard which seems to add scores for the entire history of the website and therefore seems almost entirely pointless. Time bonus points for each puzzle are just a constant, added if you beat a time limit (whether you have to be all-correct is not stated). Hints available for live puzzles, with a points deduction.
Communication Club members can discuss puzzles on forums, with automated creation of threads relating to particular puzzles. Home-made forum interface, which is a bit clunky in a few places. Some messages from club staff reporting changes, and a “latest news” area on the home page to highlight important stuff for people who don’t want to check the forums every day. No current participation from crossword setters or editors. No scope for members to say anything. Occasional messages from club staff including Telegraph xwd editor, though tucked away on a page I’d never bothered to look at until doing the research for this post – about a dozen messages this year, about half of these about maintenance shutdowns.
Printing Choice of black or grey “black” squares, 4 choices of font size. Mephisto and Listener printable on one page given appropriate font size choice. Various reports of printing problems noted on website, not all apparently resolved yet. Fixed grey for “black” squares, no choice of font size except via browser options. EV puzzles printed from PDFs.

Which site is best? That’s probably the same answer as “which crosswords are better?”, unless other features like the user forum or the non-crossword puzzles are particularly important for you. The crosswords from the other broadsheet papers are available online for free, with the Guardian one a fairly strong rival to these two as it used to be a pay site. The FT and Independent ones just give you a way of doing recent puzzles.

8 comments on “Telegraph v. Times – a crossword website comparison”

  1. for me there is no contest: The Times crosswords are not only better, but in fact the best. And now, admittedly after the odd teething trouble or two (:-) the website is better too. Ideally I would like a further shakedown of the scoring/leaderboard once we have a month or two’s experience, but I think the new site is much better than the old one, helpless moaning minnies aside. It is still a tad slow but I just open all the pages I want in separate tabs and so it doesn’t really notice.

    Interesting comparison, Peter, thank you; I hadn’t realised the Guardian site has gone from paid to free, I wonder why? And if others may one day follow suit?

    1. For “helpless moaning minnies” in the comment above by jerrywh read “a significant number of thoroughly dissatisfied CUSTOMERS, some of long membership (10 years in my own case), who happen to prefer to print their crosswords and dont give a rat’s ?@{] about leader-boards”.

      Mike O.
      Skiathos.

      1. I’ve both printed and solved online on the new site. The initial version offered some really dire printouts, but for me at least, the cryptics now print as well as they did before, and Mephisto and Listener puzzles can now be printed on one page without having to pummel them in Microsoft Word or similar – the only way I could manage it in the past.

        Away from printing, have you noticed an improvement in reliability? Apart from one spell of about an hour which seemed to be caused by something unconnected with the club site (no-one else said anything about it) I have always been able to access the site.

        I’m not saying that the new site is perfect – just that at least some of the people complaining about it seem to be refusing to notice the good bits.

  2. in this case. Thanks Peter. I have never delved into The Telegraph site not really liking the xword and well frankly i’m probably doing a tad too many xwords as it is. I’m trying to pull back to regain the ‘activity for enjoyments sake’ factor. Thus it is great to see a review of the DT site and makes the Times seem a lot better than i have been thinking. If the Times manage to iron out all the rough spots it should be very good. Somehow i can’t see the Guardian changing anything; the site is good enough as it is considering it is free and the xwords so varied that i don’t think in terms of time constraints, more pick and mix.
  3. Definitely the Times for me. I’ve not done the Telegraph for years. Last time I tried it, it just irritated me that it wasn’t as good as the Times.

    Incidentally, Peter, you forgot the Jumbo in your list of Times weekly cryptics.

      1. On the Telegraph site, when an intersection is selected, you can swap between Across and Down clues by pressing the spacebar.

        Must agree that the new Times site is much better – a nicer feel (but fairly slow if I’m on my small netbook).

        The Telegraph grid is much too large – I seem to be forever scrolling the various window. Some of the clues also disappear from time to time when I scroll! I’ve passed this on as feedback but was told it must be my computer….

  4. I used to enjoy both Telegraph and Times crosswords on Windows Mobile but stopped when Roundpoint went out of business. Yes, the Times is now available for iPhone but what about Android and Kindle? For an industry that’s already missed the boat on advertising-driven web-based business models, the newspapers seem to be slow to exploit a perfect target market. They pretty much deserve to go the way of the dinosaurs at this rate.

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