Crosswords and Crossword Tools
We’re big fans of the pattern-matcher Qat here but it’s got its limitations. For one, you can’t use your own word list when fetching results, so you have to rely on Qat’s lists. Secondly, the results aren’t ordered by “interest” in any way, so you have to deal with whatever comes out no matter how…
We posted a spiral puzzle a while back on the blog and today we’d like to introduce a tool to help burgeoning Spiral creators make their own. Check out the Spiral Construction Tool, a guided way to make spiral puzzles of your own. You’ll need to supply the first words, but after that the tool…
Are you familiar with Mechapuzzle? If you’re a fan of meta-crosswords, or “contest crosswords” like the kind you might find at the WSJ or MGWCC, then you might find its analysis useful to help you solve the meta-puzzle. Up until recently, though, it only accepted .puz files, which (1) ewwww and (2) they had to…
Most of you know about the Crossword Butler, and the butler is great, but he has only been serving up American-style crosswords. What can you do if you’re hankering for some cryptic-style snacks? Well, good news, because our butler made a friend. Introducing Cryptic Crossword Butler, serving up cryptics both American and British, despite his…
It’s been a while since we’ve had any updates about crossword tools here at Crossword Nexus, but that doesn’t mean nothing has been going on. While we don’t have any big announcements quite yet, there have been many improvements to our offerings: The Crossword Nexus Solver now has the “Notepad” available from the “File” dropdown,…
Anagram Finder Sometimes you’re working on a wordplay project and need to find some anagrams. Where do you turn? The Internet Anagram Server is good if you’re looking for arbitrary anagrams, but not great if you want your anagrams to be real phrases. Anagram Solver is good but I have two complaints about it —…
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…
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…
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…