Tuesday 6 November 2012

Puzzle #137: Crossword

The instruction booklet for the 24 Hour Puzzle Championship is out. My puzzle set will be the second to last set that is solved. Some of my puzzle examples are worth solving in my opinion. I'd especially single out the Battleships Observer, Killer Sudoku and Complementary Hexa Sudoku examples.
This Crossword puzzle is the last puzzle I made that won't appear in the set. I am not very strong at creating logic Word puzzles. I am not totally sure how to approach them. The way I do it, is that I create a grid with words and then check if it solves uniquely in a logical way. I've seen similar layouts for Crossword puzzles like mine before and I always approach them in the same way. That's how I made sure this one solved logically. I'd love to hear from other puzzle makers how they general go about creating logic Word puzzles as that's something I'd like to get the hang of at some point.
This puzzle is challenging. I'd love to hear what people think of it though.

Rules:

Place all but 3 of the given words in the grid, so that they can be read left to right or top to bottom. Every cell will contain one letter.

Example


Puzzle

Click to enlarge

3 comments:

  1. I dont think the approach youve mentioned is the best one.You might have to put much more effort if you choose that approach.I like using words of different lengths in these puzzles,though all words of the same length might look more elegant.

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  2. For a classic fill-in, your method is probably most efficient. But with some twists, you might consider solving as you go (like the crossword in AO magazine competition.)
    Personally, I solve as I go which is evident in Nansuke from Puzzle Fusion. The puzzle was the third least solved in the test and burnt 2-3 hours of construction time.
    Doing so gives a neat handmade break-in that I'm quite proud of.

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  3. Variations let you use much fewer black cells.Using the word lengths for break-ins is one good approach.Word puzzles are sometimes very annoying if you have too many possibilities to evaluate.So,i too believe in building the puzzle from intended break-ins.It is always better to have some nice pieces of logic("this placement leads to isolated words,or leads to word lengths that are not available" ,for example) , than just looking for letter positions.

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