For our 2024 series of interviews, we wanted to hear from puzzle creators about their design process, with a focus on what they learned about making a specific puzzle. Read on for our interview with puzzle writer Matt Jones.

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Can you tell us a little about your background as a puzzle designer?

I’ve been solving puzzles forever, and I had my first crossword run in a national newspaper in 1994, so I’ve been mainly a crossword puzzle writer for nearly 30 years.

Have you done EnigMarch before?

Yes! I decided to go all out in 2022 and 2023, creating a puzzle every day for all 31 days. (I’m taking a bit of a rest in 2024.)

Could you walk us through the design process of a specific puzzle you’ve made?

I wanted to stick with the puzzles for EnigMarch specifically, because the main challenge is that I was writing puzzle varieties that I’d only barely touched on before. I know word puzzles are my thing, and I appreciate solving logic problems and sudoku, etc., but I’ve never sat down and created one. This way I was creating sudoku (like the literal half-a-half-page sudoku that got a bit of attention), Shakashaka, Spiral Galaxies, Slitherlink, Four Winds, Akari, Nurikabe, Kakuro, Skyscrapers, and even far-out stuff like matchstick problems, mini escape rooms, a “What’s wrong with this puzzle?” puzzle, a Magic Eye puzzle, a size-related puzzle in the style of old Games Calculatrivia contests, etc. 

In 2022 I created puzzles that were a single page each, which gave me some limitations. In 2023 I went even further and forced all the puzzles to fit on a half-page. Many of these puzzles are based on ideas that I’ve seen implemented before (and I gave credit where credit was due), from inspirations as far afield as German crossword books, an old video game from 1990, a Norwegian version of a favorite TV show, plenty of UK quiz shows, a popular YouTube interview series, etc. 

At first, I had access to some general puzzle apps and tools like Crossword Compiler (crosswords, sudoku, word searches), and some obscure programs like QXW, a legacy program for creating cryptic crosswords with weird grids (circular spokes, wraparound torus grids, hexagonal grids), which I used for the Compact Disc puzzle from 2022. (Other than this novelty, I don’t recommend the program as it’s been at least 15 years since any updates.) There are other online sites that help with word lists and wordplay (Qat, Nutrimatic, Wordlisted), as long as you know how to work with wild card searches and Regex. 

During 2023 I had a few friends who had discovered an excellent puzzle grid creator called Penpa, which is beneficial for creating all sorts of number and logic puzzles (especially sudoku variants), but it’s got so many features that it’s actually great for word puzzles. It’ll let you fill in all sorts of geometric grids, with solution grids having a perfectly centered character (or multiple characters) in each cell. There’s all sorts of other flourishes, like different colors for shaded cells, being able to draw arrows onto the grid to indicate which direction to read, thicker outer borders and line widths, etc. 

And it’s in this messing around with Penpa’s capabilities that I got the “knot” prompt for March 25, 2023, and created the puzzle “Mini Pretzels” from scratch, this having never been an existing puzzle before. This is where it gets wild, because I’m basically creating the entire concept start to finish in under 24 hours.

Word puzzles, like many other puzzle hunt puzzles, especially cryptic crosswords and variety word grid puzzles, often will include a punchline or payoff at the end of the puzzle. That is, you’re working toward a final phrase at the end, something revealed by reading an unclued entry down the middle, or the shaded squares in a grid from top to bottom, etc. Usually it’s some sort of punny phrase centered around the theme. After figuring out I could use a triangular grid in Penpa (kinda inspired by seeing the cover word search for the New York Times’ December 2022 Puzzle Mania section, one that used a triangular grid), I found I could easily make pretzel shapes, and pretzels are long strings of dough that kinda wind and overlap, if you think about it. So in these pretzel grids, kinda like Snake Charmers and Spiral puzzles, we’re following a single string of letters from a start to an end point. However, in the grid there will be some overlaps, which now figure into the wordplay and placement of entries. Suddenly I have a few intersections where the phrases have to work in both directions. 

It was complete serendipity (sometimes how these things work!) that the payoff phrases worked as smoothly as they did (especially one phrase comprised of exactly three 6-letter words). And because of that, looking at how I could hide these phrases in the grids, it forced me to use the “two letters per cell” rule which actually makes the grid rules nice and uniform and slightly easier. (It’s not like, say, a “1 2 3” crossword puzzle where you’re putting 1, 2 or 3 letters in a space, and not told which is which, just using logic to make your way around. I mean, I could’ve done it that way, but the final hidden phrases just worked out so well. I guess it’s best to not _overly_ complicate things if you don’t have to, especially with limited time.) To further clarify, I added the rule that the two letters per cell always had to be used in the same order, 1st letter first, 2nd letter second, regardless of which direction you’re coming from. 

I seeded the phrases two letters at a time into the yellow cells and into the purple cells, mindful of three sets of two triangles (kind of a diamond pattern) where the path intersects. Then, you just use a lot of word lists that fit exact enumerations, occasionally. (I used Wordlisted from the above links, plus my own curated word list.) 

So if you have MO in a cell, you’re now looking for clearly clueable phrases that, say, fit the pattern ??MO??????????, and reading through all your options. Where the intersections occurred, those were kinda easy. The bottom two areas intersected in the same order, so if the pairs were VE/RA, you’d have two *VERA* phrases that intersected (with the only caveat that the entry had to have an even-numbered length). However, the top middle area’s intersection worked in reverse–if the pair was VE/RA, this time you’d have one answer as *RAVE* crossing the other one with *VERA*. I went for Scrabbly entries with a lot of JQXZ-rarity letters, but also wanted them to be gettable (even if you had to look up or research the clue). You have to be exact with these type of answers and leave little room for ambiguity. After ruling out the only possible crossing answers that could work, it was a decision of which combinations looked the best. 

The other challenge was that due to limited space, I had to make the clues as short as possible, because even short clues have to be pinnable to specific answers. These clues also had to be super-accurate, because if you think about it, there’s a lot of territory in these grids that remain unchecked. That is, like in an American crossword, the rules are that every square has to be part of two different clues, one across and one down. An “unchecked” letter (like you’d see in British cryptic grids) is one where the letter appears in only one entry. And in much of the upper section curves in the grid, you’re getting something like 18 letters in a row that don’t intersect anything else, so pinning something like an exact name or song lyric is the fair way to go. (I kinda learned this is similar to creating clues for acrostics and anaquotes—you’re often cluing words of 7 or more letters, and you have to be hyperspecific when cluing things, otherwise the ambiguity makes it a not-so-fun time for the solver.) 

So that’s it! I don’t know how feasible this type of puzzle would be in the long run, but I had a lot of fun making it.

Do you have any advice or closing thoughts you want to leave people with about making puzzles?

Solve as many puzzles as you can to find out what works and what doesn’t work in puzzles. (I say this especially of word puzzles—you want to absorb the cluing style, grammatical rules, accepted syntax, etc.) If you’re new to the process, as long as you’re putting puzzles out there, don’t worry about the quality of what you’re doing. However, be open to feedback as it’ll help you grow. Know your audience and I’m sure they’ll appreciate what you’ve put forward. Oh, and familiarize yourself with the tools you need to create puzzles. Using a computer _tool_ to assist your puzzles is not cheating. (In fact, there are a few programs that help you check solutions to logic puzzles, to make sure it’s a unique solution. That helped me tighten a lot of my logic puzzles.) Don’t let AI take over, even though we’re ages away from AI making anything as sophisticated and punny and fun as a human could do. 🙂

Where can people find your work?

I keep a pretty comprehensive site with my puzzles and where to find them at https://maelstro.wixsite.com/mattjones.