- #I am search for a free crossword puzzle maker android
- #I am search for a free crossword puzzle maker professional
In a British crossword, you marvel at the incredible clue. But I think this is the crucial, transatlantic puzzling difference. The clues are important, of course - they are the only thing the solver has at the beginning, after all. I am going to take “pithy and annoying” as a compliment. Some of your clues are pithy, adroit and annoyingly clever, which suggests you are trying to meet the cryptic-ky nature of UK crosswords halfway. I disagree with you about the answers being more important than the clues. We have each achieved something, and we have done it, in a sense, together. It doesn’t much matter if I do it in 10 minutes and you do it in an hour. That is important, and therefore the puzzles should be widely accessible. We are participating in a collective experience. If you and others are solving 80-clue crosswords so quickly, shouldn’t the clues be harder?Ĭrosswords are appealing because of their solverships - like, we are all doing the exact same puzzle in the newspaper everyday. I met many of them at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament last month.) (I should mention that there are people much, much faster than me. No, but imagine how much time I wasted to get there. My average for a typical, hard American puzzle is about seven minutes. How does a 90-minute solve compare to your own usual solving times? Plus, in US puzzles every letter appears in an across and a down answer, so you have at least got a chance of checking your work. In fact, how else would you begin? I suppose there are as many methods of solving as there are solvers, and none is wrong. Is that a solving technique you’d recommend? Her technique was to glance through as many clues as possible as quickly as possible to start filling the grid. Your colleagues in the US told her it was impossible.
My colleague, Cordu, says she did your first FT puzzle in about an hour and a half. Crosswords should be made difficult and interesting by the misdirection and “aha” moments provided by the clues, not by the obscurity of the answers. Possibly that, but I also worry it is a tad obscure - for example it also has another spelling, zabaione.
#I am search for a free crossword puzzle maker android
Subscribers can now solve the FT’s Daily Cryptic, Polymath and FT Weekend crosswords on the iOS and Android apps When you say, ‘I’m not sure it’s a great fill’, you mean zabaglione won’t work well with the cross-letters? Hold on, adjusting its score in my word list. I’m not sure it is a great fill, to be honest. “Italian dessert made with egg yolks, sugar and sweet wine” is maybe a little easier.
“Dessert often served in a champagne coupe”- if I wanted to make it difficult. OK, so what’s the first entry under the letter Z? Each word is scored from 0 to 100 on how nice it would be to include in a puzzle. My list has about 450,000 words and phrases. I take mental notes of colourful words and phrases that I would like to stick in a puzzle one day - and of course I add them to my software’s word list, the true currency of the modern setter. Crosswords, like the English language, ought to evolve, and stay fresh. In US puzzles, the answers, rather than the clues, are the real stars, so I try to stay attuned to modern usage and coinage. Some FT cryptic compilers can’t walk down a street without trying to make a clue out of a passing road sign or shopfront. My mother and grandmother taught me the music and language of crosswords. Plus, the ever-present stack of crosswords on our kitchen table growing up. I did a PhD in game theory, covered games as a journalist and wrote a book about the role games have played in the development of artificial intelligence.
#I am search for a free crossword puzzle maker professional
I have arranged my professional life around games, too, whether on purpose or not. Chess, backgammon, Scrabble, euchre, pinochle, Ticket to Ride - no visit to my parents’ house can be escaped without at least one. Clues in US puzzles are more straightforward. When it comes to clueing, UK setters set devious, cryptic, challenging clues. The US puzzle tends to adopt the same-sized grid but has around 80 clues, their solutions tightly packed, with very few blocked squares. Well, UK puzzles have up to 40 clues, their solutions spread over a 15 by 15 grid, with lots of blocked squares. What’s different between an American-style puzzle and UK cryptic crosswords? And - miraculously - I am now Reorder, the setter (constructor, as we Americans say) of our new American-style crossword puzzle. I also write for the magazine about stuff - horseracing, chess tournaments, the world’s tallest flagpole. I am Oliver Roeder, the FT’s US senior data journalist, based in New York.
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