My week is not complete without solving, or at least attempting, the RHWCC meta crossword.

I was never a regular solver of newspaper crosswords, but the RHWCC constructor got me hooked on cryptic crosswords. These are the typical format for British crosswords, in which the clues are playful puzzles themselves, but British crosswords tend to be far out of my reach.

Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, known as "Hex," popularized the format in the U.S. with a long series that appeared in the Atlantic. These did not require knowledge of obscure British trivia and, with a little practice, were well within reach.

Clues in cryptics are individually clever puzzles, and usually leave no doubt about the correct answer, even before you find crossing letters. That article about Hex gives a few examples, blurting out the answers, which I have obscured below. Here's one:

  Contract seeker after Gene Wilder (4,5)

The numbers indicate that the answer will be two words of four and five letters. Clues are divided into two parts, one a traditional definition or synonym, and the other a wordplay clue. Anagrams are a common device, and the word "wilder" here is a tip-off that we might need to mix up some letters. We know we need nine letters in the answer, so we will try to rearrange the letters in "after gene" (make them "wilder," eh?). This gives us FREE AGENT, which is confirmed as a kind of contract seeker.

   Leaped after the leader made the calls (5)

Here we think of a word meaning "leaped" and drop the first letter (the "leader"), giving UMPED, which means "made the calls."

Hex puzzles are especially delightful because of their themes. The titles suggest a higher-level concept that would applies to some or all of the words in the grid. There is often one or more long entries that reveal some mystery that builds up as you complete the puzzle.

The higher-level puzzle is a feature in the current fashion in crosswords: the meta. These are not cryptic, they appear to be typical newspaper crosswords in the American tradition. But they include an instruction to find some word or phrase that is clued by the answers in the grid. So while solving the crossword (which may be easy or hard, RHWCC puzzles tend to be fairly accessible), you reveal a new puzzle which may require discerning some pattern among several marked theme answers.

Meta puzzles are, fair warning, habit-forming. I have been participating in Matt Gaffney's weekly contest as well and plan to start the Muller Monthly Music Meta in 2016. Each MMMM has a music-related meta answer, and the twelve months of meta answers combine somehow to form a "mega-meta" at the end of the year. My music knowledge is weak, so I could use some help!