Mini Crosswords

These mini crossword puzzles were originally created and coded within a Python program

Inspiration:

Like many people today, I play the New York Time's daily puzzles including the wordle, connections, and best of all, the mini crossword. I love the feeling of instantly knowing an answer to a clue and that answer fitting in perfectly. I also love the next best strategy of looking at the letters found in the word and figuring out which words fit. After playing many crossword puzzles both individually and with friends, I found joy in spending some of my free time making my own mini crossword puzzles and coding a program that can display them much like how the New York Times does on their application. I used Python's pygame library to create such a game for others to play and put their crossword-solving abilities to the test. I encourage anyone reading this to try it themselves!

Puzzle Creation

While making a 5x5 crossword puzzle seems easy, it turned out to be a challenge to ensure that there were complete words in both directions, not just across or down. I did research on creating crossword puzzles and stumbled upon a video made by Joel Fagliano, the senior puzzles editor at the New York Times. He explained his methodology when creating mini crosswords, starting with a five letter word going across in the center. From there, he looks for letters in the starting word that may be hard to create 5 letter words with with that letter in the middle. So, he will black out a square or two to make a 3 or 4 letters word. From there, he continues to make other words by filling in letters that fit. He goes on to describe a tactic he uses that makes it easy to fill in letters, which is alternating consonants and vowels to form words. I used these strategies and techniques to make three mini crossword puzzles of my own, incorporating a mix of pop-culture, history, and wordplay. I also attempted to write clues worded properly with the correct tense and punctuation, as the New York Times and other puzzle editors write them.