Crossword Letters

About the game

Crossword Letters gives you a small handful of letters, usually six, and an empty crossword grid. The words in the grid can all be spelled with those letters, using each tile at most once, the way you would make words from the tiles of a word game. Your job is to find them. Every word you spell correctly drops into its place in the grid, and the letters it shares with other words make the next ones easier.

The grid is the clue. It shows where the words cross, how long each one is, and which squares are already filled by the words you have found. A square surrounded by filled neighbours is a gift: it narrows a word of six letters to a handful of candidates. Longer words come last, usually after the short three- and four-letter words around them have supplied half of their letters.

There are 63 puzzles in the collection, and the game keeps your progress for each of them separately, so you can leave a puzzle half done, jump to another one with the arrows at the top and come back later. A Hint button reveals a letter when you are stuck, and when a puzzle is finished the game tells you how many hints you used.

Playing it here

Click Play. The first puzzle opens on its own; the six letters are at the bottom, with the Hint, Backspace and Submit buttons under them. Type a word with the keyboard, or tap the lettered tiles, and press Enter or Submit. If the word is in the puzzle it appears in the grid; if not, the line above the board tells you why. The < and > buttons at the top change puzzle. The Options button in the corner can reset the current puzzle, change the colour scheme and bring back older saves. Everything is saved in this browser.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Start with the longest slots. A six-letter slot that crosses several others is the hardest to guess blind but gives the most information once it is found.

Use the crossings. A word you have found changes the problem for every word that crosses it. When you are stuck on one slot, move to its neighbours first.

Hints are a tool, not a failure. They are counted, but only so you can try to beat your own record on a puzzle you already know.

FAQ

Are the puzzles the same every time? Yes, the collection of 63 puzzles is fixed and numbered, so you can always go back to a puzzle you left. Resetting a puzzle erases your progress on it only.

Do I need to know every word? The game only accepts words that belong to the puzzle, so a word that is real but not in the grid is refused with the message "Not in crossword". A hint is there for the ones you do not know.

Is it in English only? Yes, the letters and the words are English.

Does it work on a phone? Yes. The tiles are big enough to tap, and the keyboard is optional.

Credits and licence

Crossword Letters was made by Alex Barry as a small Lua program for his own game engine, and it is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. The engine, the Lua interpreter (MIT licence) and the game run in your browser as WebAssembly. We removed the online multiplayer, the zip upload and the links to other sites from the page; the game itself was not changed. Because the licence is the AGPL, the complete source of the version played here, the patch and the build script are linked from this page, together with the licence texts.