This is too hard to be fun.
Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
#12Most of these entries are Naticks where the two crosses are proper nouns. That’s really unpleasant as it usually means there’s no way to figure out the cross unless you know the two terms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Parker
In 2008, he invented on his blog the crossword term "natick" (after Natick, Massachusetts) for an "unguessable" square crossed in both directions by proper nouns considered obscure.
Re: Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
#13That's nice ! Learned a few things today, it's more effective than hitting "random article" on wikipedia.
It would be nice if you could add an icon to the site, so I could find it more easily in my bookmark toolbar.
Re: Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
#14This is too hard to be fun.
The fact that it tells you if individual letters are right or wrong makes it much easier.
Re: Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
#15Can I see the clues after I have solved it?
Re: Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
#16Neat idea (editing UX need a bit of work, perhaps); I would much like to see _all_ hints in parallel on my screen.
Solving a crosswords is a bit like solving an equation system, since the grid is equivalent to all row questions AND all column questions combined in a big mega-confunction, so it helps to see all at once.
Re: Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
#17I love the NYT mini so I made some scripts and HTML to auto generate more 5x5 puzzles, posting one very day at my site
Great effort!
I'm a fan of the NYT Mini, too. The art of that puzzle, I think, is in the clues, which are usually not straight synonyms or dictionary-type definitions. Some examples from recent puzzles:
Name tag heading: HELLO
Word shouted during a defibrillator scene in a hospital drama: CLEAR
Kind of orange with a "belly button": NAVEL
"I'm not a ____" (online affirmation next to a checkbox): ROBOT
What breweries might creatively repurpose as seats: KEGS
Another feature of the NYT Mini is that the creators seem to limit the number of pop-culture facts to at most one per puzzle. I’m bad at names of actors, cartoon characters, pop stars, etc., but I’m usually able to solve the puzzles even when they have clues and answers like
Ogre who asks "What are you doing in my swamp?!": SHREK
[1] A few minutes later: I did try. I gave Claude 3.5 Sonnet the above clues and answers as examples and asked it to produce clues for today’s NYT Mini answers. Here are the results:
https://gally.net/temp/20240904miniclues/index.html
Not as clever as the NYT’s clues, but not terrible, either.
Re: Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
#18Keyboard navigation needs some improvement. It's not easy to navigate because you are blocked from correct guesses. Also, it wanted me to guess "SASHA", but the hint was for "Sacha" (Baron Cohen).
Not just navigation, but typing too. Just typing a word results in letters overwriting themselves because the next letter comes in before it's transitioned to the next space, so you have to type artificially slowly.
Re: Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
#19This is great! Thank you for sharing.
I have been running a 5x5 game that is more wordle like (i.e. no clues, guess entire words) at https://squareword.org for the past ~2.5 years. Interestingly, when you exclude proper nouns, there is a relatively limited amount of possible 5x5 squares with common words - I am having to add some uncommon words to make it work. I guess with nouns included this is less likely to happen, should be a much larger space of possible words.
Re: Posting a 5x5 crossword every day
#20This is great! Thank you for sharing. I have been running a 5x5 game that is more wordle like (i.e. no clues, guess entire words) at https://squareword.org for the past ~2.5 years. Interestingly, when you exclude proper nouns, there is a relatively limited amount of possible 5x5 squares with common words - I am having to add some uncommon words to make it work. I guess with nouns included this is less likely to happe…
I play your game almost daily for a year now. Keep up the good work.