Make a puzzle, print it, hand it out

A puzzle maker that ends at the printer

Everything here is built in the browser you are reading this in, on the machine in front of you. There is nothing to install, nothing to sign up for before you have seen what comes out, and the words you type are never sent anywhere: the grid is assembled locally and the sheet is drawn locally, which is also why changing a setting rebuilds the puzzle straight away instead of waiting for a server.

What you get is a page made for paper, not a screenshot of a screen. It is laid out inside the margins that A4 and US Letter have in common, so the same file prints whole on both; it is plain black on white, so a photocopier can turn one sheet into thirty without costing you a colour cartridge; and the answer key is on the page after the puzzle, at full size, rather than shrunk upside down in a corner.

Five games, and what each one is for

A word search hides the list you type in a grid of letters, in as many as eight directions and at a size you choose. Every finished grid is read back in all eight directions to check that no word turned up twice by accident, because a second copy would make the printed answer key wrong.

A crossword is built around your words and your clues, so the puzzle can be about last week's lesson instead of general knowledge. Each word is placed on a crossing with a word already there, which is why the finished grid is one connected piece; anything that could not cross anything is listed under the puzzle rather than dropped in silence.

A sudoku is dug out of a complete solution one cell at a time, and after every cell the grid is solved again to make sure exactly one answer is still possible. The difficulty is the hardest technique the grid really needs, not the number of digits it happens to start with.

A maze is a perfect maze: no loops, no walled-off corners, exactly one path between any two points. The entrance and the exit sit at the two ends of the longest route the maze contains, so the short cut you go looking for is not there.

A dot-to-dot turns an outline into numbered dots — twenty of them for a hand that is still learning to count, a hundred for one that is not. The dots sit where the outline turns, which is why the finished drawing still looks like the thing it was made from.

Who ends up printing these

Teachers, mostly, and the problem is always the same one: a fresh sheet is needed every week and a bought book runs out. Everything here is generated on the spot, so the next one is different without being worse, and it can be about the ten words this class got wrong rather than the ten words a publisher chose.

After that come the people organising something — a class party, a birthday, an afternoon in a care home, a table at a wedding — who need one good sheet and not a habit. For them the ready-made puzzles are the quicker door: they are already built, already checked, and sorted by game and by how hard they are.