Create a crossword puzzle

Learn how to build a crossword puzzle on Riddle.com in under three minutes.

We cover puzzle setup and some pro tips on how to use AI tools to help with the creation.

Transcript

Crosswords have been entertaining people since 1913. So for over a century, they’ve been one of the most popular puzzle formats. They were first introduced in a magazine called the New York World, and now you can make crosswords really easy with riddle.com. Create a new minigame, select Crosswords, and they’ll give you the opportunity to set a grid size from a small 5×5 to a really large 15×15 grid. I’m going to settle for a 6×6 grid. To build a crossword, add a list of words that you can then drag and drop into your crossword grid. Any empty space will be filled out with um one of the black squares, which is typical for crosswords. You don’t have to fill every square. It’s actually really, really hard to build a crossword that fills every single square. We’ve also decided against using AI to build these crosswords because AI crosswords tend to look like this: lots of empty spaces, um that’s not really the crossword game your readers and players expect to see when they play a crossword. Now, you can use AI to find new words that match a pattern. So here for one across, um this is my pattern, I’m looking for a word. You can go to an AI and type something like, “I’m building a crossword, help me find a word that matches this pattern,” and AI will give you a list of words that you can use. So from this list, let’s use SNAILS as the next word. So, what you do is you add a word. The word is SNAILS. You add an explanation, uh, “They carry their house on their back.” Decide if you want it across or down. Add the word. Oh, by the way, you can always change the direction simply by clicking here. And it’s not on grid, so I’m going to drag it in here, drop it, and Riddle will tell you if you can drop a word or not. So if the word doesn’t fit the grid, I can’t drop this here, okay? It’s just going to give me this error, and then I can remove it again. Okay. That’s how you build a crossword. And if you preview this, people can play the crossword. You can type SNAIL. The explanation will be down here. So, I’m going to type SNAILS. And in my settings, I’m allowing people to turn auto-check on, to check a word, check everything, to reveal a cell, or to clear the crossword. These are settings you can set in Riddle by clicking on the Options here, and then scrolling down to check all these settings. Totally up to you. So now have fun building a crossword. It’s actually more fun to build these than fill them out, at least for me. And please share your experiences and let us know what else to build. Thank you. Bye.