“Can I Make One Of Your Puzzles?”

I’ve been asked this question a few times over the last couple of months. It is a very polite question, insofar as it probably doesn’t need to be asked at all. You can copyright a specific puzzle — the words placed just so, the clues carefully phrased — but as best I understand, you can’t copyright a specific puzzle type. Anybody is free to make a crossword, or a word search, or a Rows Garden, or a Patchwork, or what-have-you.

I understand and appreciate the politeness. When a new puzzle form gets introduced to the world, it seems only fair that its creator should be allowed to capitalize on it for some length of time before other constructors crowd in. (I’m not sure what the proper length of time is, though. A year?)

Anyway. When I am asked this question, my answer is always an enthusiastic Yes. That Yes is sincere, but also it would be hypocritical for me to say anything else: My path to professional puzzlemaking was eased enormously by the constructors who came before me. The first variety puzzles I created and sold were originally invented by others — Mike Shenk’s crossword variant Going Too Far, and E.R. Galli’s twisty, turny Wry Tangles. When I started Puzzlesnacks, I had a few minor original puzzle types in my arsenal, but I was mostly pretty reliant on the established canon of variety forms. I was sending my subscribers Labyrinths and Checkerboard puzzles (both of which began with Mike Shenk), and Trail Mix and Shapeshifters (Patrick Berry), and puzzle types that have been around for so long I don’t know who invented them: Spiral, One Two Three, Flower Power, many more.

So now that I am adding to the world of variety puzzle types, am I going to frown on other people creating examples of them? Not hardly. If you solved a puzzle type that I created, and enjoyed it enough that you want to try making one yourself, to give away or to sell somewhere, you have my full blessing. Just let me know about it, huh? I’m going to want to solve it.

(Caveat: I was asked by a constructor if they might pitch an entire book of one of my puzzle types, and I requested that they hold off on that. I’d like to be the first person to give that a go. I think that’s reasonably fair.)

And since there is always some confusion, in puzzle-construction circles, about who originated a given variety form, let’s talk briefly about the puzzle types I think of as “mine.”

Cascades

Two answers in each row, and then consecutive answers stepping down each “cascade.” The clues for a given cascade are grouped together, but it is up to the solver to figure out where each set of cascade answers goes in the grid. Joon Pahk has gone a step further, putting all of the Cascade clues into a single long list — I thought that might be a little too much, and it is certainly harder, but not overly so. For a constructing challenge, see how few words you can get away with, on average, in each cascade.

Consonant Companions

A recent creation — I’ve only made four of them so far. In a minute I’ll discuss a puzzle type called Fraternal Twins. That puzzle has two different grids, and solvers work back and forth between those grids until both are entirely filled. The two grids “communicate” with each other in a way — if you get stuck in one grid, the other might offer a helping hand.

I got to thinking, how else can two grids communicate? Fraternal Twins is based on anagrams. What if instead the puzzle was based on what we hardcore puzzlers call the “consonantcy?” In a consonantcy, you take a word or phrase, strip out the vowels, add in new vowels (not necessarily in the same places), and get a new word. For example, you can change MISQUOTE to MOSQUITO by changing which vowels are placed among the consonants MSQT.

And that’s how it is with a Consonant Companions puzzle. There are two grids. In each grid, the consonants get put into the shaded spaces, and vowels go into the white spaces. The consonants are used in the same order in both grids; the vowels change as needed. (The letter Y should never be used.) I make a point of lacing a reasonable number of high-scoring Scrabble letters into these puzzles — you don’t want it to be all R and S and T.

For an extra challenge for your solvers, only number the left-hand grid, and present the right-hand clues out of order.

Double or Nothing

A puzzle type where the title came first: Hey, how about a crossword grid where you either put two letters or no letters into each space? Then you could call it Double or Nothing!

The only problem with this idea was: I couldn’t construct it. I saw it not as a themeless puzzle but with a gambling-related answer running across the middle of the grid, and no matter how many different ways I tried to build off that central entry, I simply couldn’t get it to the finish line. I presented the problem to Patrick Berry, and he said, “Maybe I’ll give it a shot, but that sounds really hard.” And so of course he had a completed grid to me before the end of that same day. (You can try that first puzzle here. I’ll note that when we first passed this around at a puzzle convention, we didn’t tell anybody what the trick of it was beyond the title.) Patrick has since made many Double or Nothings for the Wall Street Journal — all of them, astonishingly, gambling themed just like that first one. I am content to make themeless Puzzlesnacks-sized ones and leave it at that.

Drop-Ins

UPDATE: I completely forgot about this one when I first put together this post. I suspect this type might not have the potential longevity of some of the others, but I still like it — the weird-looking grid, and most especially the magical transformation the answers undergo. You first enter words in the grid, back and forth following the path but ignoring the small circles. You then place a given letter into some of the circles so that the original answers become a whole new string of words. For example, if the first word in the puzzle is SUSHI, and the second word begins with an E, you can add the letter N twice to turn that string into SUNSHINE. The letter you add is always the same across a given puzzle, but differs from puzzle to puzzle.

Fraternal Twins

Fun as they are, there’s a certain sameness to a lot of variety forms — words go this way, and then they also go that way. I wanted to try something a little different, perhaps involving anagrams. Eventually I wound up with this two-grid concept, where the six letters in a given section are the same across the two grids, but appear in scrambled order, forming different words. So far this type has only shown up in Puzzlesnacks, and in this far, far more challenging version I made for the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. Will Shortz has purchased one for the New York Times, but I don’t know when it will pop up.

Jelly Roll

I used to post puzzles every day on Twitter, inspired by whatever that morning’s “Word of the Day” was at Merriam-Webster’s web site. It was a fun little exercise. One day I came up with a thing where a string of words could be broken up into pairs of letters, and those pairs of letters rearranged to make new words. When I was looking around for new forms to add to Puzzlesnacks, I revisited this idea, and discussed it with Mark Halpin, who came up with how the puzzle could be best visualized. (He named it, too.) The puzzle remains much the same as it was first presented: The white path has a string of consecutive answers, and so does the gray path, and then so does the path that travels back and forth alternating between the white spaces and gray spaces.

Patchwork

Patrick Berry has a very neat form called “Boxes,” where answers are placed across each row, and then those answers can also be broken up into rectangles, each of which matches a Boxes clue. I tried making a Boxes puzzle once, and it is a tough construction. But then it dawned on me — why did they have to be boxes at all? Why not irregular sections? That would provide the constructor with a lot more flexibility. And lo, Patchwork was born. This has become one of my favorite puzzle types to create.