Crosswords that run three ways at once. Each cube holds twelve interlocking grids — four facing each way — built on the British newspaper rule generalised to three dimensions, so every face and every slice reads as an ordinary crossword.
A cube with all one hundred and twenty-five of its squares in play and not one blacked out. The walls here are bars — they sit between two squares instead of taking one away, so they stop a word in one direction and leave the other two running through. That is a thing only a solid can do: block a square in three dimensions and you lose it three times over, which is why every other puzzle here is full of holes.
Print — 5 flat gridsA box with one corner sliced off by a slanted plane, and the exact opposite of The Diamond: of the forty-eight ways to turn a cube onto itself, this solid survives one — leaving it where it started. The lopsidedness shows in the count. Five crosswords face one way, four the next and three the last, and the answers run every length from three letters to nine.
Print — 5 flat gridsEvery square within six steps of the middle, and nothing past it. Symmetric under all forty-eight symmetries of the cube — turn it any way at all and it is the same solid. Thirteen entries each direction, and not one shorter than five letters.
Print — 9 flat gridsNot a box either. Five square sheets stood one behind another, each one square higher than the last, so the answers that thread from sheet to sheet run three letters where the stack overlaps and five where it does not.
Print — 5 flat gridsThe Tower laid on its side. Nine letters go Across and five every other way, so the long answers and the short ones swap directions.
Print — 5 flat gridsNot a cube. Taller than it is wide, so the Down entries run nine letters while everything else runs five — and eleven crosswords sit inside it rather than twelve.
Print — 5 flat gridsSix of the answers belong to the theme. Finding them is half of it.
Print — 5 flat gridsThe biggest one here, and the only one clued right through as cryptics — forty-eight of them, all with an eye on the news. Twelve crosswords, four facing each way.
Print — 7 flat gridsStart here. Small enough to hold in your head while you learn the shape.
Print — 5 flat gridsEmpty solver. Drop a puzzle in, or cut a grid and fill it in the browser.
It is an ordinary crossword, three times over. Words run left to right (Across), top to bottom (Down) and away into the depth of the cube (Through), and every letter is shared by the words that meet on it — so an answer you are sure of gives you letters in two other directions at once.
Tap a square and type. The clue you are on is at the top, with the
entries that cross it beside the number: tap one of those to follow it.
Drag the cube to turn it, and use Show to look at one
crossword at a time, or all of them laid out flat like an ordinary
puzzle.
Open the workshop. Click squares to cut the black ones, press Fill grid to have it find words that fit, then write the clues against the cube as you turn it. It will tell you as you go whether the grid you have drawn can be filled at all, which is the thing that decides everything else.
When it is done, Export playable HTML gives you a single file that is the whole puzzle — email it to somebody and it opens and plays with nothing installed.
Install it and the puzzles work with no connection at all — on a plane, on the Tube, anywhere.
Your browser will offer this from its own menu (“Install app” or “Add to Home Screen”).
Open any puzzle and press Share link. The whole thing — grid, answers, clues — is packed into the address itself, about 2 kB. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.