My first crossword

Posted on Tue 24 January 2017 in crossword

I made my first crossword! This is something that I've been working on very intermittently since 2011. Very intermittently, in the sense that I would make progress only when I was flying across the country on college breaks and, with no any internet connection, sometimes didn't have anything better to do.

(Skip to download the puzzle below.)

Actually, this is my second puzzle, but my first one is pretty sloppy and I'd rather show you this one. Maybe that one will see the light one day, maybe not.

This puzzle even has a theme of sorts. See if you can guess which are the theme clues. (I'm sure you can.) I imagined this printing in the New York Times on Thanksgiving of some year as I triumphantly waved drumsticks in the air and forced loved ones to solve it.

Making the puzzle

It was surprisingly difficult to create the puzzle. I still haven't looked into the process and resources that experienced creators use, though I'm sure these can ease the process substantially. In my attempt, I created a 15 x 15 table in iWork Pages/MS Word and shaded cells to achieve black squares. I would place my theme answers, then try to fill in corners one at a time. Eventually, I would come to an impasse and have to backtrack, deleting answers until a fill would be possible again.

At first, all answers came from my head. But if I can't solve every crossword, then surely the set of answers I could think of was much smaller than those necessary to ensure a diverse fill. I next resorted to using regex with /usr/share/dict/words (or larger variants). This was an imperfect solution as dictionaries don't have nearly the phrases, abbreviations, acronyms, and proper nouns that make for an interesting puzzle. I finally used XWord Info's excellent clue finder and, in my most active phase, even shelled out a small donation to get more access. (You may note that by this time I was not necessarily flying on an airplane.)

This puzzle has seen many iterations. For each, I was my own worst critic, circling my "groaners" even as friends who play-tested it didn't seem to mind. I minimized these in this final version the best I can, though I'm sure Rex Parker would show no mercy on several of my answers.

Making the puzzle

Get the puzzle