My Puzzle Regimen, by Eric Berlin:

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So you might be asking yourself—and if not, I’ll ask it for you—what sort of puzzles does a puzzle addict solve?

I shall tell you. Sit down and grab a snack, this is going to take a while.

First and perhaps most obviously, I solve the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. I don’t get the paper itself—I subscribe to the puzzle online for $39.95 a year. I’m not a wicked fast solver, at least not compared to my friends, but I can do the Monday and Tuesday puzzles in less than five minutes. As for the Saturday puzzle, famed for its devilish difficulty, on a real good day I can conquer it in twenty minutes or so. On a bad day—well, we’re talking hours, and I might have to leave a few squares blank.

I used to also solve the New York Sun puzzle, which in every way met or exceeded the quality of the Times crossword. Alas, the Sun has folded, though the crossword editor is trying to bring his puzzle back online.

Back in my freelance writing days, I did a lot of work for Games magazine. Some of my friends from that time have gone on to create their own Web site, Puzzability, which features two puzzles I do every weekday—the Daily Post and Common Knowledge. The former is a wordplay challenge that changes every week; the latter is a hangman game with a twist. Puzzability also provides puzzles to Southwest Airlines in-flight magazine, and I make a point of doing them whether I’m flying or not.

Though word puzzles will always be my first love, I’ve recently been sucked into the wide world of logic puzzles—specifically, all those “Japanese logic” variants that nobody ever heard of before sudoku swept across the land. I tend to dive into one puzzle type, solve it for a few weeks or months, and then move on to the next. For a while it was Killer Sudoku, which is not nearly as scary as the name implies. All it means is, in addition to following the usual rules of sudoku, the digits in each “cage” must add up to the given number. (I put a fairly easy Killer Sudoku in my new book, The Potato Chip Puzzles. See, they’re so not-scary, even kids can solve it!)

Those are fun, but my latest addiction is Slitherlink. In a slitherlink puzzle, you have to draw a single continuous line from dot to dot around the entire grid, and each digit in the grid must have exactly that number of line segments around it. If you’ve sudoku-ed yourself until your eyes are glazed over, Slitherlink will make a refreshing change of pace. And there are plenty of other logic puzzles out there to keep you entertained. Conceptis Puzzles is good source for them, with an excellent online interface.

Now we move on to the heavy hitters: Cryptic crosswords. How to explain these diabolical puzzles? They are crossword puzzles on steroids. Or hallucinogens. Bear with me for a moment.

A standard crossword clue is often extremely straightforward. For example, the clue for THINKING might be:

Mulling things over

Simple, right? A cryptic crossword clue takes this one step further. Every cryptic clue has two parts. The definition is there, but the answer word is also demonstrated with a bit of wordplay. So the clue for THINKING might be:

Svelte ruler is mulling things over. (8)

“Mulling things over” is the definition part of the clue. But what does “svelte ruler” mean? Well, “svelte” means “thin,” and a ruler might be a “king.” So “svelte ruler” literally equates to “thin-king.” The same word is thus defined twice, once in the standard way and once in a very tricky and insane way. It is up to you to figure which part of the clue is which, and then work your way through to the answer.

I know. Yikes. But there’s a hardcore group of puzzle lovers who can’t get enough of this stuff.

Here’s a more-complete guide to solving cryptics. The cream of the crop for cryptic lovers is the Atlantic puzzle by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, which generally have nasty tricks in them even beyond those found in normal cryptic puzzles. My friend Trip Payne also has a bunch of cryptics on his Web site, as well as some excellent standard crosswords and a few other surprises that any puzzle lover will be delighted to discover.

This is all in addition to whatever puzzle books are taking up space on my bedside table. There’s always at least one, and usually two or three. Plus I’m a member of the National Puzzlers’ League, with its own puzzle-filled monthly newsletter, The Enigma. I don’t solve The Enigma as much as I used to, but every so often something in there will catch my eye and distract me from all the other puzzles clamoring for my attention.

Whew. I think that about does it. Time for me to go solve something!

Eric Berlin, The Potato Chip Puzzles, YR mystery, Penguin Books