new obsession

My two former obsessions were 1) the New York Times Crossword

and 2) the Crytogram. For those who aren't familiar with the cryptogram, basically the letters you see are codes for other letters that make up real words/sentences. So for instance, in the example below "F" probably stands for "A" or "I" since it stands alone and "a" and "I" are the only single-lettered words. Now looking at the word below "F-P-B" I would make an educated guess that "F" is actually an A since a three-letter word starting with a is more common then a three-letter word with I..."are" vs. "ice". Get the idea? Have I lost you? Moving on...

 

Well, it's very fitting that my new obsession is basically a hybrid of my two former obsessions. Meet CODEWORD! Its basically a crossword with no clues or a cryptogram in crossword format. Instead of letters representing other letters, numbers represent letters, and once you get letters from one word they can help build up letters of another word. 

I discovered this puzzle in the free Tube paper, but since it's so great I searched for it online and found a site where you can play! My first puzzle ever and I got the third best time, not too shabby.