Love this and play daily! Needs to have a submit button for better tracking your guesses and grading you each day.
I love crosswords, so it's been fun to write crossword-like clues:
[it contains MSG]
[___ <=== you ===> hard place]
Still working on a lot of features/fixes. I'm aware that scoring based on keystrokes is pretty unfair, especially given not-ideal custom keyboard on mobile! Still thinking through the best solution there.
Also fun fact: if you sign up for the email list, you get a special "Word of the Day" email written by James Somers (of https://jsomers.net). The only way to sign up for the email list is to finish a puzzle!
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(answer key: NYC, ROCK)
I really think it at least needs to give you the number of letters though. Some of the clues get really tough since you don't get any information - either number of letters or a few "given" letters from other clues like you get in crosswords.
Especially if you get "penalized" for keystrokes - there are some clues that end up as a lot of random guessing because so many things can solve them.
A good example - on Feb 19; I was guessing "New York" and "New York City" over and over because I was pretty convinced that's what it was. When I finally had to reveal it, finding out it wanted "NYC" was pretty frustrating.
Across ages might be a bit easier, because there's more material at hand in your own language, but I do notice a considerable distance between me and my daughter in all kinds of knowledge. E.g., I haven't keep up with pop since ages.
But it's a nice, and nerdy, game format.
Echoing angry_moose's suggestion, a hint about the # of letters (on mouseover?) would help a lot. Or maybe that would make it too easy?
Of course, I’ve been a steady cruciverbalist for 35+ years, so learning a new puzzle style will always take a while. Do agree that until OP settles into a smoother rhythm, adding the length of the solvable answers would help.
I did not see the one angry_moose is talking about but in a normal crossword, even without seeing the number of letters, if the clue was like, "Most populous city in the US" -> NYC vs "Most populous city in the United States" -> New York City. Again, not sure if that was the case here since I didn't see it. (edit: I went and saw it, the clue had MSG vs Madison Square Garden hence, NYC, not New York City)
Cool puzzle though.
Btw, a self-plug, for the polyglots out-there: https://paul.fragara.com/cw.html Poly-alphabets crosswords, mixing Latin and Cyrillic letters!
I think it might be because this format puts the words into a strict hierarchy of clues, meta-clues, etc, while in a traditional crossword puzzle, the words form more sort of a network, where you can choose the order by yourself.
I wonder if you could restore that property somewhat by arranging the clues into a graph structure instead of a hierarchy. E.g.: (slightly nonsensical example)
[#1: Famous software company] Inc announced a revolutionary new implementation of binary search [#2: The #1 does not fall far from the ___]s today, as well as an improved type of cryptographic [#3: algorithm that needs a [#4: origin of #2, purpose of #1], 3 words]. The ideas are said to have originated from a recently discovered high school notebook of [#5: Co-founder of #1, 2 words] himself.
I'll also weigh in and say that solving sub-clues when you can see the higher-level answer is a good feature, and makes the game more crossword like. I wouldn't allow skipping that
Grandpa Smurf (original French name Vieux Vieux Schtroumpf)
- There should be an easier way to know which brackets match.
- This game would probably be more fun with a 2-dimensional visualization of the layers. It would be more fun to see you knock off layers and see the progress you've made.
>scoring based on keystrokes is pretty unfair, especially given not-ideal custom keyboard on mobile! Still thinking through the best solution there.
Maybe just the enter key or a button on mobile to confirm. I think counting the letters is fair because we still have to think of the potential entries, and there's some strategy to that. (Like [___ in comparison] has several idiomatic answers, but you have to look at the context to determine it.)
You should plug your spot. Or send me an email. I'm always on the road and I'd like to stop by.
My wife is a public librarian that creates puzzles for a Summer Game that her library runs. She'd like to re-use this idea with book titles for their 2026 Games (too late for this year unfortunately).
How would you like to be credited if she's able to pull this off?