A stag do game that survives the first round

Every stag weekend has dead time nobody plans for: three hours on a coach, forty minutes waiting for a table, the flat afternoon after the activity. Those gaps usually get filled with phones, and the group quietly stops being a group.

A printed crossword handed round the coach is the least demanding way to fix that. It costs nothing, it needs no equipment, and it works for the man who has decided he is having a quiet one as well as the man who has not.

Good answers are the ones the whole group recognises: the five-a-side team, the first car, the university nickname, the pub, the job he lasted three weeks in. Ask the best man and two old friends and you will have twenty in half an hour.

Write the clues so that people who only know him from work can still get somewhere. A grid that only three people can solve stops being a game and becomes a private conversation.

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.