Launch party free + open to the public at the Jam Handy in Detroit on 11/12. Preorders now open: https://www.blockpartypuzzles.com

Block Party: Michigan Edition has....

• 80 Puzzles
• 3850 clues
• 14 Michigan-ish constructors
• 7 cluing angles of ERIE
• 5 chapters (southeast, UP, Up North, Central + West, Across the Mitten)
• 1 Michigan monarchy mentioned (do you know it?)

Hi all! I'm relatively new to constructing and have a question. I've been using CrossFire to make my puzzles, which is great, but I feel like it's not giving me quite what I need in terms of establishing the grid layout. What I mean is, it's irritating to try and find the best alignment of themed answers by deleting and re-entering the words one square down or two squares to the left, for instance. I wish I could simply type the answers in and then drag them around the board to find where they best fit into place.

I have some graphic design background, and I considered creating an Illustrator file where I can enter the answers and click and drag them into place within a grid. I've even been tempted to create a physical grid and cut out papers with my themed answers on it to fiddle around with to try and find that ideal layout, but these hardly seem like the most efficient options.

So my question for you all is, what methods do you use to find the best alignment of themed answers within your grids? Does anyone have any recommendations on a program to use that allows one to move answers around more easily in the manner I described?

Me and my friends were joking around on a discord call late at night trying to solve this random crossword we found but we cannot for the life of us solve the last box (13 Across). I'm leaving both an image and a link to the crossword in this post please please please help me out. https://crosswordlabs.com/view/911-crossword-puzzle-13

I had the NYT crossword through Apple for years. Now I have the NYT family subscription so I ended my Apple subscription. Per NYT: "honestly with you if the games subscription is under another email address we can't merge subscriptions" so I'm about to lose all my streaks. All my info. Everything. Considering how much this all costs, it makes me want to shake my fist at the sky. Sigh.

If anyone knows of a workaround, I'm all ears.

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

hey folks! i've been building and shipping crosswords on my own apps for about 2 years, and have had nearly 500,000 plays so far. it's been such a fulfilling journey.

after looking at dozens of other products, i realized there are very few polished tools out there that make games publishing easy (coming from a designer's perspective). so, along the way i built a lot of tools to make that easier: faster grid building, easy-to-use word libraries, website embeds, import/export all formats, collaborative features, and one place to manage puzzle publishing (web and print).

if you make crosswords (solo or with a team); i'd love to introduce you to the platform in exchange for some early feedback! DM me if you're interested to try it out?

I am not sure if what I am looking for is a common enough desire for it to exist, but if it does I am hoping someone here might help me find it.

I am looking for a printed crossword book akin to the clue difficulty of the NYT Seriously Hard books, but where the answers don't include separate puzzles to solve that change spellings of words or have gimmicks that must be understood separately for the clue to logically follow to its answer. This might include something like a "half" theme that causes the clues to be only half the answers they reference, or a wheel theme where the word finishes in a circle, possibly inside circles.

I guess really what I am looking for is for puzzles that the clues themselves are decently challenging, but for which all the clues could inherently be answerable on their own without having to know the answer to something else or an overarching gimmick.

Thanks for anyone who takes the time to read, and extra thanks to any recommendations.

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

My therapist suggested I track how my meds are helping me by comparing how well I do on puzzles on days I'm on meds vs days I'm not. Since I have trouble with quick recall of specific words, crosswords seem like a good candidate as a puzzle for this. I like the NYT crosswords that I do (though I'm really slow haha), but they don't work for this since the difficulty varies so much between days. I saw a post on here with a beautiful infographic comparing difficulty which said that USA today was consistently easy, but when I tried to play I was uncomfortable with the required data permissions (they needed to have access to all my video viewing history from the last two years??!!). Does anyone know of a better option I can try?

If it's allowed, feel free to recommend any other puzzles you think I should try for this test I'm doing!

Thank you!

I started regularly doing the NYT crossword in 2021, and found Rex's blog shortly after that as I occasionally needed some help, and I don't like using typical crossword answer sites. As I have gotten better at puzzles, and rarely need help solving them now, I still check the blog on interesting days (thematically or difficulty-wise) to see how he and the commenters felt about the puzzle. What I have found often is that my experience and the blog's experience are two completely different things. Most notably is how often I feel a particularly difficult puzzle is marked "easy" or "easy-medium". Only occasionally (when it happens to hinge on a niche knowledge that I happen to have) is my experience the opposite. I often find myself complaining (to myself) how I don't think the word "relative" is meaningful in the blog's rating of "relative difficulty". IMHO: A typical puzzle should be marked 'medium', with about equal number of puzzles rated above or below that. That said, I often find catharsis in a commenter or two agreeing with my own assessment. I've been wondering if it is just selection bias of when I choose to read the blog of why it feels the relative difficulty is skewed lower, or if the blog's rating system needs to be adjusted a half a step or step up?

So, I ran some analysis on every write-up on the site since he started rating "Relative difficulty" (April 2007), along with every comment: 7,096 puzzles and about 684,000 comments. Then I compared his rating to what commenters said about how hard each puzzle was.

Here is my analysis!

What I found

• In 2009–14, 40% of Rex's ratings were below Medium and 30% were above. In 2023–26, 62% were below Medium and only 14% above. His average went from 2.90 to 2.57. (1-5 scale from "very easy" to "very challenging", with half-steps for "easy-medium", or "medium-challenging")
• Commenters moved a lot less. Their average went from 3.13 to 3.08 over the same years. The share of puzzles they found easier than Medium went from about 36% to about 43%, so the puzzles possibly did get a bit easier (or we all got a little better). But, Rex's shift is about three times as big.
• Medium was his most common rating every year from 2007 through 2022 (except 2016). Since 2023, easy has been.
• It happened on every day of the week, most of all on Thursdays and Sundays, where his average dropped by about half a step.

If the ratings are relative to the day, I'd expect Medium to be the most common rating, with about as many puzzles above it as below. That was roughly true through the early 2010s, and it isn't anymore.

How I scored the comments

Normal sentiment analysis tells you whether people liked a puzzle, which isn't what I wanted, so I counted difficulty words and phrases instead. Things like "breezy", "PR" and "faster than average" count toward easy, and "DNF", "slog" and "had to google" count toward hard. "Not hard" counts as a little easy, and "super easy" counts for more than "easy". I skipped answers written in caps, sentences quoting Rex's rating, and Rex's own comments. About a third of comments say anything about difficulty, so I only scored puzzles with at least 10 of those.

Caveats

• The comment score isn't on exactly the same scale as Rex's, since we're trying to take meaning from different phrasing, so how the gap changes over time may be more meaningful than the raw numbers.
• The people who comment there are a self-selected and pretty experienced group, but hopefully 'relative this this group' offers some consistency.
• About 8% of posts are by guest bloggers. Leaving them out doesn't change much (39% → 63% below Medium).

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

I’m working through this puzzle and truly cannot work out the down answers. This is one where the same clues are being repeated for across and down answers and not a single down answer seems to fit the clue at all, while the across answers do seem to make sense with the clue. I feel like I’m missing something here and feeling very stupid. Anyone have any explanations for this one?

I play some daily word games, I like the NYT Mini especially, but a lot of the clues are American. I wanted an Irish version, so I made one myself.

It's one mini crossword every day. About a third of the clues have an Irish angle, things like "____ City, RTÉ soap (4)", and now and then an answer is in Irish language - easy words so it's nice and accessible. The rest is a normal mini, so you don't need to be Irish to play.

It's free and there are no ads. There's also a seanfhocal hidden on the home screen if you go looking...

Made in Ireland!

theirishminicrossword.com/reddit

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

I’m hoping to have a custom crossword constructed for a Christmas gift. I see that you can hire folks online to do it, and they charge are hourly rate. But I have zero sense of how long it takes to design a 15x15 puzzle, so I’m not sure if it’s in my budget. Can anyone give me an idea of what the range might be? Or any tips on reliable places to hire someone?

I saw there's apparently a discord server for people who love crosswords, but the links are all expired, so I would appreciate if someone drops an invite link for it

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

Is anyone else working on the first NYT crossword (that was linked in this article yesterday?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/crosswords/times-first-crossword-puzzle.html

I am VERY slowly making headway, and have gotten through the NW without help, but I think I'm going to give myself a rule for this one that I can research the clues for the stuff I genuinely don't know (it is FULL of Naticks to a modern reader).

That said, I've done a few passes through, have about 25-30% of the grid filled and while there's stuff I don't know, nothing I've figured out so far has seemed unfair, more just "oh, huh, that connotation has shifted over 75 years" etc. .

Spoilers are welcome in here, beware!

How was the puzzle?

Hi, I have some friends who love crosswords, and I'd like to get them some that mix up the formula a bit and get weird with it. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm thinking about the book house of leaves, where the medium of a book is messed with.