About Puzzleable

Puzzleable is a British crossword site with two halves: a builder that turns your own words and clues into a finished, shareable crossword in about five minutes, and a set of free daily puzzles anyone can play. It started from a simple, slightly stubborn idea: that a crossword made out of someone's own life — the names of their children, the pub they got engaged in, the nickname only their sister uses — is a far better present than anything you can buy in a hurry on the way to a party.

The site does one thing properly. You type in the words you want in the puzzle, write a clue for each one (or ask for a suggested clue if you're stuck), and the grid is built around them automatically. If you don't like how the words interlock, you can reshuffle the layout or change how tightly the answers overlap until it looks right. The whole thing usually takes a few minutes rather than an evening.

When it's finished you decide who sees it. A private puzzle never appears anywhere public: it's reachable only by the link you send or the short share code you hand out, which works when someone types it into this site. Publishing a puzzle publicly instead gives it a page of its own in the crossword library, where anyone can find and solve it — and search engines can index it. Either way you can unpublish a puzzle later, and doing so takes the public page down. If you'd rather have something on paper — a table favour at a wedding, an order of service filler, a retirement card insert — there's a print-friendly version of every puzzle too.

Whoever receives a puzzle solves it in the browser against a timer, with a hint button if they need rescuing. Solve times are recorded, so a family or an office can quietly turn it into a competition. Most people arrive with an occasion in mind: a milestone birthday, a hen do, a wedding, a leaving do, a new baby, Christmas. Teachers use it for revision and quiz hosts use it as a round. Nothing assumes you've set a crossword before — the fiddly part, fitting the words together into a grid that actually works, is the part the site handles for you.

The daily puzzles

Three free puzzles go up every morning at 6am, and every past day stays in the daily archive. The Daily Easy is a small grid of around fourteen answers with straightforward definition clues — roughly five minutes over a cup of tea. The Daily Hard is a bigger grid of around twenty-six answers with tougher, more allusive clues, and usually takes fifteen minutes or so.

We used to publish a third daily grid, the Alphabet Puzzle. It has been retired, so a day is now the Easy and the Hard. Alphabet puzzles already published are still there in the archive if you have a link to one.

Leagues

A league is a private group — a family, an office, a WhatsApp group — that you start and other people join with a six-character code. Each day everyone's finishing position in the games the league has chosen is added up, lowest total wins the day, and daily wins roll up into weekly and monthly winners. Nobody's data leaves the league: you only see the standings of people you share one with.

Who runs it

Puzzleable is operated by Daedalus Works Ltd, company number 17415486, 8 Devonshire Square, London EC2M 4YJ. It's a small independent site funded by unobtrusive advertising, with an optional Supporter plan for anyone who would rather play without ads.

It's a work in progress and always will be. If something is broken, confusing, or missing, email admin@puzzle-builder.com or use the contact page — messages go to a real person, and feedback from people making puzzles is what decides what gets built next.