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Crostic Nines is a daily acrostic word-guessing puzzle. Given nine clues numbered 0 through 8, you must guess all the words in the puzzle to win, including the "crostic nine"—an additional word formed along a vertical line down the middle of the board.
Back to Crostic Nines main page
To guess a word, click on its clue. Any non-alphabetic characters in player input (numbers, punctuation or other symbols) will simply be discarded. Guesses that are too long or too short are considered invalid and will be ignored. Guesses for a word that has already been correctly guessed will also be ignored.
If a guess is CORRECT, it will be revealed on the board and its clue will be marked as guessed correctly.
If a guess is INCORRECT, any letters that are in the correct position will be revealed on the board.
The crostic nine is an additional word formed along a vertical line down the middle of the board. There is no clue given for it. You must figure it out by correctly guessing or revealing letters in other words.
The in-game help page shows a list of all the words that have been guessed already, with an indication of how many correct letters have been revealed. For instance, consider the following list:
❎ 1. sprint, pushed
✅ 4. FOUNDER
✳️ 5. dispersION, COncLusION
From this, we can see that the player has correctly guessed word #4 (✅), matched six letters from #5 after two incorrect guesses (✳️), and made two incorrect guesses for #1 that matched no letters (❎).
If the crostic nine is correctly guessed, it will be marked with a star:
⭐ 9. CONDUCTED
The game's word list contains over 5,000 words that are between six and twelve letters long. The list includes words in various forms, including plurals and third-person verbs (-s), past tenses (-ed), gerunds (-ing), and adverbs (-ly). Clues will generally give hints if a word is in one of these forms. If you are guessing a longer word, try prefixes such as dis- or mis-, im or in-, un-, or suffixes such as -able or -ible, -ive, -ity, -ness, -sion or -tion, and so on.
Proper names (of people, places, etc.) are NOT included in the word list.
Although some of the sources used to produce the word list are old (one is from 1875), the word list does NOT include archaic word forms (e.g.: "giveth" or "walkest"). On the other hand, the list does include some words that are uncommon or rare in modern speech. Hooray for vocabulary building!
If the word you guessed is incorrect, you can always try looking it up in a thesaurus to find words with similar meanings. (It's not cheating, it's research!)
Often, the key to guessing other words is to guess the crostic nine first; this will reveal one letter in each of the other words.
You can ask the game for hints when you get stuck. The first time you play, you are allowed a total of three hints. Each new day, you accrue three more hints, to a maximum of nine. If you run out of hints, you will have to wait until the following day to get more.
You may ask for a hint on any word that has not yet been correctly guessed. When you ask for a hint, the game will reveal a random letter somewhere in the word you have chosen. For example:
Before hint: 1 ..............□■□□□□........... [6]
After hint: 1 ..............□■□k□□........... [6]
Note that a hint will never reveal one of the letters in the crostic nine. In the example above, the letter in the space marked "■" will never be revealed when asking for a hint.
Scores are calculated based on the following formula:
Score = ceiling ( hint factor [HF] * guess factor [GF] ) + bonuses
The hint factor (HF) multiplies your score when you win the game by guessing all words. Using hints lowers your potential score, so think carefully before using them! Here are the possible values of the hint factor:
+---------Guessed all?-+------+
| YES | NO |
+----------------------+------+
| # Hints used | HF | HF |
+----------------------+------+
| 0 | x3 | |
| 1 | x2.5 | |
| 2 | x2 | x1 |
| 3 | x1.5 | |
| >3 | x1 | |
+----------------------+------+
The guess factor (GF) is based on how many guesses you need to find all words. The fewer tries needed to guess all the words, the higher your potential score. On the other hand, if you give up before guessing all the words, you only get 10 points per word correctly guessed. Here are the possible values of the guess factor:
+----------------Guessed all?---+----------+
| YES | NO |
+-------------------------------+----------+
| # Guesses (g) | GF | GF |
+-------------------------------+----------+
| <10 | 250 | |
| 10 | 200 | 10 per |
| 11-15 | 200+(10-g)*10 | correct |
| 16-44 | 150+(15-g)*5 | guess |
| >45 | 0 | |
+-------------------------------+----------+
There is a 25-point bonus for guessing the crostic nine without winning, and a 100-point bonus for winning (i.e. guessing all words). There is also a time bonus based on the time it takes for a win. Winning in less than 1 hour results in a 50-point bonus; the bonus decreases each hour until it reaches zero after 9 hours of play.
The maximum possible score is 900 points, but this is exceedingly rare! If you can achieve it, you truly are the strongest—a master of Crostic Nines. ⑨
You win when all the letters on the board have been revealed. When this happens, the game will end and you will see your statistics for the game.
If you're really stuck and you don't expect you'll ever find the answers, you can give up by guessing "quit" at any time. The game will ask you to confirm that this is what you want: Be careful! There's no going back after you give up, and your score will suffer if you don't guess all the words.
Once you confirm, the game will end and you will see your statistics for the game, along with all the correct answers.
The settings screen allows you to change some basic options, including your name and display options.
Your name is displayed in the game's UI and on the leaderboard and past puzzle log. By default, your name is taken from the Common Name (CN) attached to the client certificate you use to play the game; you may change it to any string of up to 20 characters, including letters, numbers, spaces and dashes.
Crostic Nines has optional support for ANSI colors. It also has optional support for underlines, which are implemented using Unicode modifiers. Both of these options are off by default as they are not supported by all clients and systems and may cause garbled display. You may turn them on and off while playing, and the game will remember your preference.
To check whether your client and system support these display options, you can open the display test file at the link below.
Display test for ANSI color and underlines