50th birthday crosswords: half a century, one sheet of A4
Why a crossword suits a party where four different groups know four different people.
Different guests, different clues
A fiftieth pulls in school friends, work colleagues, neighbours and family, and each group knows a completely different version of the same person. Left alone, those groups will stand in four corners all evening.
A crossword forces a small amount of traffic between them. No table can finish it alone, because the school answers sit next to the work ones, and somebody has to go and ask.
Building the grid
Ask three people from three different eras for six answers each. First job, the band, the holiday everyone still quotes, the street they grew up on, the car, the catchphrase.
Keep four or five general clues from the year they were born as a way in for anybody who only met them last year.
How to make your own in about five minutes
Open the builder, type in twelve to twenty answers — single words work best, and names are fine — then write a short clue for each one. If a clue is not coming, the clue helper will suggest one you can edit rather than accept wholesale, which is usually the faster route.
The grid arranges itself around your words, and you can reshuffle the layout until the shape suits. Publishing gives you a link to send and a print view with the blank grid, the clue list and a separate answer sheet on A4. Nobody you send it to needs an account to solve it.
Printing it for a room full of people
Every puzzle on the site has a print view laid out for A4: an empty grid, the clues in two columns, and the answers on their own page so you can keep them back. Printing one copy per person and one answer sheet for whoever is running things is usually the right split.
If you would rather not print, the link works on any phone browser and keeps each person's progress separately, so a table can race without sharing a screen.