Forty years of work, twenty clues

Retirement gifts default to vouchers and a card with forty signatures and no messages. Neither says much about the person going, which is a shame after a career spent in the same building.

A crossword built from their working life reads as though somebody paid attention. It takes an afternoon of asking colleagues for one memory each, and it prints on a single sheet that can be framed, stuck in a card or read out at the do.

Send one message to the team asking for a single word: the nickname of the department, the machine that never worked, the annual event they always ran, the year they joined, the biscuit. You will get more replies to that than to any request for a paragraph.

Mix in the general retirement furniture — pension, allotment, cruise, Tuesday — so the grid is solvable by people who joined last year and never worked with them directly.

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.

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.