STEINBERG: Fair enough. This will show you your existing templates and provide you with a bar to search for templates online. That is Mr. Steinberg’s and Mr. Last’s challenge. Preschool-age children play with colorful plastic toy blocks. LAST: Right! TAUSIG: Agreed — great lead for a theme. the maximum for a 15 by 15 in a New York Times crossword is 78 words/42 blocks, heat map of what grids look like as the week goes on. To make a consistent theme from this, we would need to find at least three phrases with the name of a game company in them. His crosswords have been featured in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, BuzzFeed, and Queer Qrosswords. There are way fewer three-letter words than four-letter words, which means our colleagues won’t have a great choice of fill, so let’s go with one of our other themers. One nice thing is that the first Z could go in a long, nonfill slot. STEINBERG: There are a few ways to make a crossword puzzle, including the good, old-fashioned graph-paper-and-pencil method, but there are several excellent software programs that make designing and filling grids easier. That’s why it really … sings. Now we have a phrase unrelated to toys, and yet it contains toy or game words. I thought we just plug our lovely theme answers into a piece of software and, voilà, a beautiful crossword emerges. We’d have two options if we went that route. Humans are a much better judge of what makes fun and “good” fill than a computer. After all, there are a few promising toy words, but not a lot. VIGELAND: Dad jokes are so second nature to me, I don’t notice them. I love this, and not only because it’s a song I’m hoping to sing someday. I’m feeling better already. Among others, I got PRIME NUMBER, FAX NUMBER and WRONG NUMBER.

There’s a case to be made that manual construction helps you learn the contours of the English language better than software does, but maybe the biggest boon is how much faster the software is.

There are many ways to make a puzzle, of course, but this series will highlight the basics. STEINBERG: Yup! STEINBERG: Here’s the ambitious version of our final grid, without the test AutoFill: LAST: Great. TAUSIG: It’s a solid foundation. VIGELAND: Indeed, we’ll need pairs of equally long theme answers so that we can obey one of the more rigid rules of crosswords: placing your theme answers in symmetrical positions in the grid. Themes and theme entries should be accessible to everyone.”. A great place to begin and the topic that aspiring constructors must master first. Taylor Jewell/Invision, via Taylor Jewell/Invision/Ap. Do you know why? For example, “superman: man of steel”. I’m often asked which comes first, the grid or the clues, and the answer is: the grid.

What are some puzzle phrases? Bonus words are typically lively, and they’re a great way to add sparkle to a fill! The goal is to place the theme entries and black squares in such a way as to get the best chance of filling the puzzle with sparkling, lively nontheme entries. LAST: We should probably stick to basics, though, so here’s what we’ll do. CrossFire also works on PCs. And since I have young kids, most of the “stuff” in my world (or my apartment, anyway) is toys. Namely, the “game” aspect of our theme is in the word MATTEL.

But that is not the best, because that model does not provide the funding for continual improvement or support in case of a problem. What if we cut off that section with one more black square above the L in PUZZLE PIECE? A PUZZLE PIECE as a game object is very far from the silly sense of PUZZLE PIECE as a song about crosswords. “How to Make a Crossword Puzzle” is a response to reader questions about how constructors move from an idea to a completed puzzle that is ready for submission. If I want only four-letter words in the first position, I could type in “???? I’d suggest looking at CALL NUMBER. When I worked as a summer intern for Will Shortz, he showed me an old crossword reference book which had pages and pages of, say, five-letter words that have the structure “?W?? VIGELAND: Good point. STEINBERG: Well, we could put PUZZLE PIECE in the third row, but then we’ll have a bunch of three-letter words clogging up the grid.

If the theme includes a particular kind of pun, for example, then all the puns should be of that kind. He writes crossword puzzles for The New York Times and The New Yorker, and is the author of Word, a book of crosswords geared for a younger generation.

Finn Vigeland is a graduate student in urban planning who lives in Somerville, Mass. I’m going to list shorter toys that could be part of a longer phrase. Plus, it’s also 11 letters long, which matches PUZZLE PIECE and thus advances our grid symmetry mission. And one of the most fun parts of brainstorming themes is seeing how far you’ve come from your initial ideas. CALL NUMBER is our only other 10-letter option, so in it goes. In Part 1 of this Wordplay series, two New York Times constructors, Ben Tausig and Finn Vigeland, demystify the process of developing a theme set. You can also load a crossword you’ve already started making in this window by browsing your computer for it. YO-YO, DOLL, BARBIE, UNO, PUZZLE, JACKS …. Let’s watch them work it out. We want phrases that don’t have to do with the actual toy companies — we lose the wordplay aspect if LEGOLAND was a theme entry, because LEGO in there already refers to the company. A 14-letter theme entry is not ideal in a 15 by 15 grid (the black square that would accompany it in the 15-letter-wide row limits where the entry can be placed in the grid), and while BACON NUMBER is quite funny, the base phrase’s meaning (how many degrees of separation you are from the actor Kevin Bacon) might not be familiar to all solvers, so let’s try CALL NUMBER. Constructors tend to place theme answers as far away from one another as possible, to give them breathing room and increase the likelihood that the grid will fill well. But we should not be sad about this failure! In Part 2 of the Wordplay series, the puzzle makers David Steinberg and Natan Last design a crossword grid around our theme set. I just enter “*NUMBER” in the query and a whole lot of phrases pop up. Let’s work in CrossFire since we both use it. VIGELAND: This is the same principle we had earlier when we were going down the game manufacturer or toys route, but we have a reason for moving this theme forward: punny clues. We have other options that amuse me more: CARDINAL NUMBER (14), BACON NUMBER (11) and CALL NUMBER (10). All you do to add a symmetrical pair of blocks is press the period key in one of the two squares (or in the exact center, if we’re being precise). Crosswords make great personal gifts for weddings, family reunions, and holidays. LAST: Yup, nice. Any words or phrases on your mind today that we can start with? I can imagine lots of other entries that pair a noun in the first word with a synonym for SONG in the second word. In Part 2 of “How to Make a Crossword Puzzle,” which will run May 11 on Wordplay, the Times constructors David Steinberg and Natan Last take the theme set Mr. Tausig and Mr. Vigeland constructed and build a grid around it. We need to make sure the bonus words go in the Down direction, though. Something like, “Song when reading a British raincoat catalog?” What do you like, Finn? Follow him on Twitter @dsteinberg49. The crossword puzzles that solvers dig into every day are a combination of sweat, creativity and a knowledge of the basic rules of constructing, which is what making a puzzle is called. TAUSIG: Whatever the lengths, they have to be paired to meet another rule of crossword constructing: most themed grids are diagonally symmetrical for aesthetic reasons. TAUSIG: Sometimes, yes, but failure is so crucial to finding a good theme. Check out this heat map of what grids look like as the week goes on, created by Darren McCleary, a senior Games engineer at The New York Times. Note that Finn put the name of the theme-answer-to-be, TRIXIE MATTEL, in all-caps, which is a common convention. STEINBERG: Yup, the software used RE-AIR — a terrible entry to begin with, and one that duplicates the AIR of MACBOOK AIR, usually seen as an inelegant no-no. And best of all, they make me laugh.

For every great idea, there are usually a bunch that get tossed out. Mondays are generally closed off (note all the black squares around the edges), which tends to lead to smoother fill. Just as in theme development, there is a lot of trial and error. STEINBERG: Before we do that, though, let’s back up a little. David Steinberg edits the daily, nationally syndicated Puzzle Society Crossword. Starting Without a Template. That’s something we’ll want to keep track of while we brainstorm. Once the grid is loaded, you’ll see a screen that looks like the one below. One longstanding rule is that grids must be rotationally symmetric, which means that they look the same if you turn them upside-down (other kinds of symmetry exist, too, but that’s a topic for an advanced grid-design column!). We might, for example, clue this as “Song for when you match someone’s poker bet?” That makes sense, and yet it’s utterly distant from a CALL NUMBER in a library. STEINBERG: Me too! VIGELAND: Speaking of toys and games, I was just watching the finale of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars,” which was won by TRIXIE MATTEL (12), and Mattel is of course a game manufacturer. Maybe if we name a few toys, we’ll find another seed entry, one we can build on. VIGELAND: Let’s go to two wonderful resources now, OneLook.com and XWordInfo.com/Finder, in order to look up other phrases that end with the word NUMBER. Unfortunately, after a quick consultation of the Wikipedia list of game manufacturers, I see that we might be out of luck. Look at it: It’s like a “Hidden Figures” game for bad crossword fill.

LAST: O.K., O.K., I’ll take three orders of the software, and a Shamwow to boot. Follow A to Z Teacher Stuff's board teaching: free printables on Pinterest. Print the crossword and optionally the answer key on page two. STEINBERG: Remember that we also we want plenty of space between theme answers … with all of that in mind, how’s this? I’m not sure yet how we might draw a connection, but there is potential here!