Crosswords and Crossword Tools
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…
At Crossword Nexus, we’re all about collaboration. It’s why we’ve opened up the Collaborative Word List for anyone to modify and use, and why we’re releasing more and more of our codebase on GitHub. With that in mind, we’re beyond pleased to announce a collaboration with the good folks at Beyond Wordplay: a Google sheet…
Puzzle Links: JPZ | Online Solver I’m very pleased to be able to present this puzzle to you today, because it is a continuation of two crossword series I really enjoy. One is Adam Aaronson’s “Grid Charlemagne” series, which up until now consisted of two puzzles by Adam and one by Christopher Adams (maybe…
PUZZLE LINKS: JPZ | Online Solver With the advent of online solving and advanced puzzle formats like JPZ, you have to question why we do some of the things we do. Like, why mark theme entries with an asterisk? If it’s not obvious which ones are your theme, you don’t want solvers hunting them down…
PUZZLE LINKS: JPZ | Online Solver Huge shout-out and very happy anniversary wishes to Amy Reynaldo and her whole crew with the original and still best crossword blog in all the land. I can honestly say that had Amy not given my first published puzzle such a nice write-up, I don’t think I would have…
For years now we’ve been hosting the collaborative word list at my personal web site, and it’s been fine, but there are a few disadvantages. First, the list is completely reliant on my website, and if it goes down or changes something the list is down. Second, the updater program is a packaged perl script…
PuzzleMe is the standard for embedding crosswords these days, and why not? It’s got a slick interface, plenty of customization options, and analytics. That said, there are some things it can’t handle. If you want to embed a Marching Bands puzzle, or a Spiral, or any number of other variety puzzles, the PuzzleMe solver won’t…
Over on CrossCord, user NoahF had a fantastic idea for crossword construction: what if there were a Tinder-like interface for editing entries in your wordlist? An interface shows you a random word for your list and you edit its score by swiping, tapping, etc. User JayLow came up with the “Griddr” name for such a…
PUZ | PDF | Online Solver Yes, this is yet another blog posting the occasional crossword puzzle. This despite there being no shortage of great independent crossword puzzles out there. So what do we bring to the table that other places don’t? Well, open up this puzzle and you’ll see a few things immediately: This…
I’m on record as not being a huge fan of the Across Lite binary format, otherwise known by its three-letter file extension .puz. Its limitations are one of the main reasons crosswords were stuck in their conventions for years. It’s limiting and it’s annoying, so why is it still so popular? Well, despite the file…