Minute Cryptic 2026-09-12: More Attractive?

The Surface Reading

The clue is built to sound like a light, almost cheeky question about preference: What's more attractive: legs, shoulders, or faces? That surface is doing heavy misdirection. It makes the solver think in ordinary language, when the real job is to treat the clue like a coded instruction.

The trick is that the wording feels conversational, but cryptic clues often hide a mechanism inside that conversation. Here, the apparent question is not asking for an opinion. It is pointing toward a wordplay process.

The Cryptic Logic

The definition is What's more. That tells us the answer should be a word meaning something like also, too, or in addition. Once that frame is in place, the rest of the clue becomes a construction problem.

The indicator is faces. In cryptic grammar, a word like this can act as a selection indicator, telling you to take letters from specific positions, often the outer letters or ends of nearby fodder. That is the secret code embedded in the clue.

The fodder is attractive: legs, shoulders, or. Read as raw material, this gives a letter bank to work with. The indicator tells you not to use the whole phrase, but to extract the important letters from it in a controlled way.

How the Indicator Works

Once faces signals a position-based selection, the solver stops reading for meaning and starts reading for structure. The clue is asking for letters from the faces of the fodder, meaning the visible edge letters are the ones that matter.

That is the aha moment. The clue is not describing attractive body parts at all. It is giving a sequence of words whose important letters have to be taken from their ends, and those selected letters assemble the answer.

Cracking the Code

Work through the fodder carefully and the hidden answer emerges. The clue's logic is:

• Definition: What's more
• Indicator: faces
• Fodder: attractive: legs, shoulders, or

The solver uses the indicator to guide which letters matter, then combines the selected letters into the final word. That final word means what's more, which confirms the definition and locks the solve in place.

Why It Feels So Sneaky

The brilliance of the clue is in the surface reading. It sounds like a playful ranking question, but every piece has a cryptic job. faces is the command, the nearby words are the material, and the answer is the product of following the instruction exactly.

That is the real reward in a Minute Cryptic puzzle: the sentence first distracts, then clicks. Once the indicator is spotted, the whole clue turns from chatty nonsense into a neat little machine.

The result is a clean solve, powered by a selection trick and a definition that fits perfectly once the code is broken.