(Ah man, Jack just put “Mustang Sally” on the radio… this road trip is gonna be awesome!) Rule Six:įor most themed 15×15 puzzles, you should have a maximum of 78 words in your puzzle. When you’re placing blocks, make sure that all the words in your grid are three letters or longer. Words cannot be shorter than three letters. If it helps, feel free to imagine that you’re reading these rules while you’re going on an awesome cross-country road trip with your best friend: famous actor Jack Nicholson). (As I said, there are a lot of rules in this section. Pretty self-explanatory… like the puzzle’s theme, the border blocks should be placed symmetrically too. side stories about assassins help to break up Dan Brown books into manageable chunks you can read on the subway).Īnd, folks, if you thought that last step had too many rules, then you’re gonna flip when you see how many rules the block-adding portion of this guide has! Rule Four:īlocks also need to be placed symmetrically. Now that you’ve come up with a theme, it’s time to add in the black border squares.Īs shown on the “Cutest Antebellum Presidents” puzzle above, border blocks help to break up the puzzle into manageable pieces (just like how B.S. You may think it’s fun and cheeky to add a copy of your theatrical headshot into your crossword puzzle… but don’t! Newspapers will NOT publish this sort of puzzle! I cannot stress this next point strongly enough. This puzzle is titled: “A Pretty Cool Guy When You Actually Get To Know Him” So, when you’re making puzzles, make sure to use all-original words! Otherwise, here’s an example of a puzzle that does repeat words (meaning that, sadly, it will never be accepted by a reputable news publication). In fact, 99.9% of the time, puzzles don’t repeat words at all. Unlike most Dan Brown books, one of the great things about crossword puzzles is that they don’t repeat the same exact words over and over again. So, again, just make sure to download that stuff and you’ll be golden. However, since these four entries are all of differing lengths (not symmetrical), this puzzle has no chance of ever getting published… even though it’s a really good theme!įortunately, most puzzle-making software will make things symmetrical for you. On the other hand, here’s an example of a non-symmetrical grid, in a puzzle that I’ve titled, “Things That Don’t Exist”:Īs I hope you will note, the above puzzle contains four things that clearly don’t exist. What this means is that, when you’re coming up with entries, they should all be of corresponding lengths (in the example above, see how the words match in grid-position and word-length). On a standard crossword grid (15×15 squares on Monday-Saturday, 21×21 squares on Sundays), puzzles are almost always symmetrical. Of course, when coming up with a theme, there a few rules you need to follow… Rule One: presidents, this would obviously be a really good theme for a crossword puzzle. So, hypothetically speaking, if you wanted to make a puzzle about, say, “America’s Cutest Antebellum Presidents”, the theme would appear in the puzzle as follows:Īs you can see, since these four theme entries are all great examples of super-cute antebellum U.S. Or sometimes the theme is just a bunch of similar things, like “phrases that start with the letter ‘Q’” or “things that scare people” or “songs about horses.” Or “songs about horses that scare people.” Basically, a theme can be anything. For example, sometimes the theme will feature answers that all have some sort of pun in them (ex.

Usually, a crossword’s theme consists of 4-6 answers that are, in some way, related. Like the gooey center of a deep-dish Chicago-style pizza, the most important part of any good crossword is its theme. So just download Crossword Compiler or Crossfire or some other program that has the word “cross” in the title, and you’ll be all set. Otherwise, this whole process will be an unending, dystopian nightmare from which there can be no escape. When making a crossword puzzle, you’re gonna need the right software. Since this basically means that I’m a puzzle-making genius (and not, you know, super unqualified to write this kind of article), I thought I’d share some tips on how to make the best crossword puzzle ever. Recently, I got my very first crossword puzzle accepted by a real-life newspaper.

Make your own crossword puzzles