Cryptic Crossword Puzzles
All of the following crosswords are of my own design and creation unless otherwise attributed! Thanks to Viresh Ratnakar for his amazing Exet and Exolve tools, that are used for creating and rendering these puzzles respectively. Thanks to my friends, especially Angelika Cathor, for playtesting and editing.
All crosswords can be solved here in the browser, and any progress will be kept in your local storage. The puzzles are also all available for download as PDFs to be solved offline or in paper.
Heres a good cheatsheet from the Wall Street Journal on some basic wordplay types. If you are looking for some more detail on getting into Cryptics, i've written a more thorough guide here.
Intro Cryptics
Start Here. These are the most accessible crosswords I've made. Very heavily inspired (cough cough) from the format of quick cryptic puzzles from the Guardian, these puzzles provide a limited set of clue types, meaning any one clue should be of those four types, and never rely on more than one cryptic element.
Puzzles of this level are most of what I have solved myself but writing under these constraints can be at times both challenging and inspiring. They tend to be the ones I can actually share most widely as they aren't too tricky to get into!
Full Experience
Full Puzzles. These can have any kind of clues and combinations of multiple cryptic elements. The difficulty is generally trying to be around the level of the Guardian's Quiptics (not the same as quick cryptics!) but since I've only ever solved a few of those myself it's hard to speak to that much. These will come in a variety of sizes, so far 11x11 and 15x15.
Personally these puzzles are the ones I'm most proud of to date, so please give them a try especially if you've made it through all the intro puzzles!
My First Puzzles
The Wild West. Looking at the crosswords in this section is like looking back on bad code you wrote five years ago. What was I thinking? This doesn't conform to Ximenes at all, etc...
I was a bit too set on forcing specific clues into the grid at the cost of other fills. Having said all that, there are some fun clues and ideas in here, and it would be a shame to have spent all the time without having them published somewhere.
