#puzzmo

[oneefin]

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am i seeing double?

i'm in puzzmo again! leo tsai invited me to co-construct for one of their minis this month - you can play the results of our back-and-forth here.

[smallerplaces]

Here I was this morning (May 14, 2026) doing the Puzzmo midi, and I was tackled by a Jet Lag reference.

I guess it's not a surprise that people who make puzzle games enjoy content from people who make a different kind of puzzle game.

[abcwordsurge]

was doing the puzzmo crossword today and one of the clues was "identity often paired with ace," three letters, and I DIDN'T GET IT. I HAD TO GET IT BY GETTING THE ACROSS WORDS. I MISSED IT.

[ephemeral-gremlin]

shilling for puzzmo because my lisa hanawalt playing card deck came in today and i'm obsessed with it

this site has lots of daily puzzles incl a crossword with clues like "TRANS RIGHTS" and although some of it is free, some is subscription-based and if you subscribe you get a free deck of cards by lisa hanawalt (bojack horseman / tuca & bertie)

i ran across them after cancelling my NYT crossword subscription during the tech workers strike and did the free trial of the subscription for their crossword archives and honestly i can't see myself going back to nyt unless i get really crossword-happy and start doing both (unlikely)

also idk if this was said on the website and i just missed it or if it was a Fun Surprise but the deck came with a code to buy a one-time/lifetime subscription which i did because this is my daily crossword spot now for the foreseeable future

Re-imagined mainstays like the daily Crossword Puzzle, modern classics like Really Bad Chess and SpellTower, and even a few brand new puzzle

[fallout-lou-begas]

i was doing the puzzmo daily crossword with my butch boyfriend last night and you cannot imagine how excited this clue made me specifically

[evannakita]

I made a crossword puzzle!

It's June 24, 2024, and I'm the constructor of today's daily crossword on Puzzmo! It's my first-ever published crossword, and I'm extremely excited for the public to check it out!

Below the cut, I've written out some fun tidbits about the puzzle and the process of making it. That being said, SPOILERS follow—only read further if you've already completed the puzzle!

Hi again, I hope you had a fun time solving the puzzle! I certainly had a fun time constructing it. I’m incredibly grateful to Brooke for organizing Puzzmo's Open Submission Week, for giving me a second chance to submit after the theme of my first submission wasn’t a good fit for Puzzmo, and for helping me throughout the process of theming, filling, cluing, and hinting.

This puzzle began with the idea of using a diagonal to spell out something that actually is diagonal. As a public transit enthusiast, I’d initially thought of [FUNICULAR]. But the idea quickly expanded with the decision to also include horizontal and vertical answers corresponding to horizontal and vertical things. And since [ELEVATOR] was by far my favorite possible vertical answer, that left [ESCALATOR] as the obvious choice for the diagonal. Initially, I’d planned [CONVEYOR] for the horizontal answer, but Brooke pointed out that conveyors typically aren’t used to carry people the way escalators and elevators do. The next option I proposed was [TRAVELATOR], but I ended up liking [CORRIDOR] more, because I wanted the puzzle to have diagonal symmetry if possible.

Already, I had a ton of constraints for filling the grid—each letter of [ESCALATOR] had to intersect not one but two other answers, which would have been tricky even before adding in two other theme answers and diagonal symmetry. So I ended up spending countless hours testing out possible grid layouts in order to try to get a good fill. At first my idea was for all three theme answers to intersect at the bottom right, but I chose the current layout to represent how escalators and elevators don’t actually go between the same two points, meaning that when a train station is designed around escalators; [ELEVATOR] users are forced to also use a [CORRIDOR] to cover the horizontal distance. (Here in NYC, that makes for inconvenient wheelchair access to the fancy new platforms at Grand Central Madison, and it also means the planned accessibility upgrades at the Broadway Junction subway transfer will be a massive undertaking.) I personally find designing efficient train station layouts to be a lot of fun, and so I greatly enjoy the game STATIONflow, and I thought it’d be appropriate to shout it out in this puzzle’s title!

I did end up eventually managing to get a fillable grid (thanks to Ingrid and Spread The Wordlist—oh hey, yet another thing Brooke deserves major kudos for!), but due to all my self-imposed restrictions I had very little flexibility in what the non-theme answers would be, meaning I was stuck with some tricky ones like [SIDE A] and [ALDIS]. But honestly, I think the limited flexibility made cluing more fun than it otherwise would have been, since I now had the challenge of finding fun clues for answers I didn’t pick. I got to revisit some happy memories in 4-Across and 18-Across, I got to shamelessly plug my DeviantArt in 11-Down, I got to shout out an incredible activist in 19-Across, and I got to be unreasonably proud of myself for coming up with 10-Across. Some of my original clues were too long and confusing for Puzzmo (I was slightly sad to shorten my original description of a [T BAR] as a “low-budget chairlift alternative that’s basically an anchor that hooks around your butt and pulls you up a hill”), but Brooke was a tremendous help with capturing the spirit of my clues in fewer letters. And a couple clues were straight-up Brooke’s ideas, including 1-Across, 5-Down, and notably 17-Down—I hadn’t heard of Ayra [STARR] before but her music is excellent and I am very glad to have learned about her through this.

Brooke was surprised I wanted to hint my own puzzle, and I get why—hints aren’t meant to be entertaining, and coming up with good ones can be quite challenging. (Shoutout to Matthew for being an absolute hinting MVP!) I actually quite enjoyed all the lexical games, though—the “mancala” anagram for [ALMANAC] was a very satisfying find, and I was quite proud of how my hint for the crossword staple at 27-Down was able to match the Minecraft theme of the clue. (Of course, the flipside was that some hints, like the one for [KORRA], had to jump through a lot of hoops to get to something coherent.)

I realize this is probably way longer than it needs to be, but making this puzzle was just such an experience. I’m absolutely going to keep making puzzles, and that’s all thanks to Brooke and Puzzmo.

[maxkirin]

Oops! Today's stream is nothing but dailies~

My lovely wife (Lady Kitty Lynn) joins me for a whole stream of games you can only play today! We're talking Wordle, Gamedle, Movie to Movie, Puzzmo--and so many more!

Live Now! 🧩 youtube.com/mistrekirin

[oneefin]

i got access to puzzmo workshop :O the private beta they're running which they announced at crossword con. it's like a little community hub thing where you can make your own puzzles, post them, and check out other people's stuff. i put one of mine up there!

they've got support for the crossword and for circuits currently. just for fun i had a go at their circuits editor and made a little thing. you could try solving it here statically! just fill each blank with a word such that two adjacent cells connected by an arrow form a compound phrase.

this is fun and if they flesh this out and more people start being on it i might do more stuff :)