Crosswords and Crossword Tools
Have you ever wanted to make your own version of the NYT’s Spelling Bee? Sure, it’s easy to just put down seven letters on a piece of paper, but what about scoring? Acceptable words? Easy playability? To my knowledge, something like that doesn’t exist. Until now! Check out Hexagon Lexicon, our please-don’t-sue-me-named word game that…
PUZZLE LINKS: JPZ Download | Online Solver Back with an acrostic today! I like how this one came out. Thanks to our test-solvers Chris and Ajay on Crosscord for looking this one over. Also, at Chris’s suggestion we’ve added a link to our Acrostic Generator to the main site, so it’ll be easier to…
Want to make sure your puzzle is acceptable before submitting it to a publisher? Check out our brand-new submission checker, which allows you to choose a file and see if it checks all the boxes a publisher might require. This includes the clue character count (mandated by Universal and USA Today) and the de-duper functionality…
PUZZLE LINKS: JPZ Download | Online Solver I can’t believe I found an Oscar Wilde quote that fits symmetrically and that no one has used before. I mean, I literally can’t believe it, so I assume one of two things is true: either (a) someone has used it and I just wasn’t able to find…
JPZ | Online Solver Kate Chin Park– otherwise known as Kate Schmate on her website and on Twitter — collaborated with me on this one, and thank goodness she did, because this puzzle is WAY better than it would have been without her fingerprints on it. Kate is a pro at all aspects of…
Read More “Puzzle #8: Runnin’ With The Devil (collab with Kate Chin Park!)” »
JPZ | Online Solver If you’re wondering why we’re posting so many acrostics recently, you may have missed the announcement of our Acrostic Puzzle Creation Tool. Since that announcement we’ve made some improvements to the tool. Most notably, you can now specify words you want to keep in the puzzle, and the tool will use…
JPZ | Online Solver A terrific interview with Parker Higgins dropped last week at Beyond Wordplay, and while there were many good bits, this little sentence stood out the most to me: A funny gap is that no one really talks about the license under which blog puzzles are released. This really got to me,…
The Crossword Nexus Solver has supported acrostic puzzles for a while now, but acrostic puzzles remain relatively uncommon in the indie puzzle community. This is a shame, because acrostic puzzles are very fun, and I for one want to see more of them. So what’s holding constructors back? Constructors may not know how to create…
Online Solver Why don’t more acrostics have titles? Aren’t they just rearranged quote theme puzzles? Here’s hoping this sparks a trend. Some of you have perhaps never solved an acrostic before, so here are instructions. Use the lettered clues below to fill in the numbered squares. Each letter will automatically be filled into the correspondingly…
A few days ago, some of us had a great time doing some old New York Sun crosswords on stream, but instead of doing them the old-fashioned way, we first converted them to diagramless puzzles. This added an extra challenge, and discovering the shape of the grid was a surprise each time. It was…