Man, this takes me back.
Years and years ago, Matt Gaffney, Joon Pahk and I ran dozens of Kaidoku (otherwise known as “coded crosswords”) on my now-defunct blog. Well I think it’s about time to bring these things back, so here’s one from the archives. How does a Kaidoku work, you ask? Well:
Each answer in a kaidoku, or coded crossword, is a common, lowercase English word. The numbers 1 through 26 each stand for a different letter of the alphabet, and instances of a given number stand for the same letter throughout the entire grid.
I think these are pretty fun. Try this one out and tell me what you think!
As someone who has done a lot of these puzzles, and made some variants myself, I’m glad to see this.
Do a lot of people call this puzzle type Kaidoku outside of Japan? I know there is a Gaffney book, but it seems everywhere else in the English-speaking world these are called Codewords or Coded Crosswords.
In the puzzle you posted, I’m surprised you didn’t give any letters to start off. It makes the difficulty level rather high. I eventually got there, but it wasn’t the smoothest solve. Crossword Compiler has a good online applet for this type, and also gives you a handy alphabet chart so you know what letters are left. Jeff Davidson also posted a forked version of Xword that supports JPZ Codewords too: https://github.com/jpd236/xword/releases (Full disclosure: I asked him if he could make this fork.)
The codeword variants I’ve done usually feature weirder words/grids, as well as second separate cryptogram component, but I compensate by starting the solver off with more letters.
Thanks for solving! It is difficult, but I’m glad you got there.