Introducing CrossCraft: Custom Crosswords
Create themed & personalized crossword puzzles with ease and either play yourself or surprise your loved ones with a custom-tailored special gift. Perfect also to playfully learn vocabulary or challenge your students or friends with a fun quiz.
Are you a crossword enthusiast who's ever wished for a more personalized puzzle experience? Or a big fan of franchises like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings in search of the next challenge to prove your deep knowledge? Or perhaps a teacher looking for an engaging way to reinforce vocabulary with your students? Maybe you're just searching for a unique and engaging gift idea for your next family event. Whatever your motivation, CrossCraft is here to transform your ideas into fun crossword puzzles in a matter of seconds. And all that for free!
Full Personalization possible
CrossCraft isn't just another crossword puzzle app. It's a tool that allows you to create an infinite number of varied crosswords on a selected topic. On top of that, you can add your own clue-answer pairs to personalize the crossword or to ask more specific questions targeted to your audience. The app will always place your custom questions into the puzzle first before filling the gaps with the selected topic. That means, if you provide enough custom questions, you can even create entirely custom crosswords with nearly no fill-words from the selected topic. Perfect for teachers preparing a fun challenge for their students.
To prevent inconvenient typing on a phone or tablet, the app can import lists of clue-answer pairs from CSV or JSON files. This way, you can easily create your custom content on your computer using tools like Google Sheets, which even allows collaboration with others to get more content faster. When you're ready, save the sheet as a CSV file and create your entirely custom crossword.
Lots of Topics to Choose from
Creating a large enough set of clue-answer pairs can be a tedious and time-consuming task. For a well-filled medium-sized crossword, hundreds of pairs could be needed, depending on the length of the answers and their characters. That's why CrossCraft ships with a wide variety of topics that you can use as a fallback to fill in the gaps. Or to simply create a crossword that is themed without any custom questions. The personalization step is entirely optional!
In the first release, 20 different topics from 5 different categories are supported:
- General Knowledge: Famous People, Geography, History, Pop Culture
- Movie Franchise: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Marvel (MCU), Star Wars
- Sports: American Football, Basketball, Formula 1, Soccer
- Language Learning: English, French, Japanese, Spanish
- Programming: Android Dev., Apple Platf. Dev., Flutter, Ruby on Rails
More topics in more categories will be added with each update. Some of the next topics I have on my roadmap are Movie Quotes, Game of Thrones, Anime, more languages like German or Italian, and many more in new categories like music, art, literature, science, and technology.
Which topics I include next entirely depends on what users want most: Inside the app, there's a "Suggest Topic" button – make sure to use it for your favorite topic!
Other features like the ability to define a solution word are already planned.
In all Shapes and Sizes
When creating a crossword puzzle, you can choose from 5 different sizes, 3 different shapes, and 3 different difficulty levels. For example, the topic "Spanish" contains the 600 most frequent words in Spanish. If the easiest difficulty level is selected, only the 200 most frequent words are used, 400 in the mid-level, and all 600 in the hardest level. This way you can start easy and make it harder when you tend to know all the easy answers.
For educators, it can be important to print a full-page crossword. The shapes "landscape" and "portrait" are sized to perfectly fill a full page. When sharing or printing a created crossword, CrossCraft provides the option to export the puzzle and the clue parts separately. This way, the puzzle can be printed on one page, and the clues on a second, improving readability, especially for larger crosswords.
For Everyone and Everywhere
Both the app and all topic contents are available in 7 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, and Turkish. The language for the clues can be selected independently from the app's interface language, allowing it to easily create crosswords for different language audiences. Where appropriate, the topic contents were adjusted for the audience of the language. For example, when asking for famous TV hosts, in English these could be "Oprah Winfrey" or "David Letterman", whereas in German other names like "Günther Jauch" and "Anne Will" are more appropriate. These adjustments were made for all languages.
Also, note that no server-side is involved when creating the crosswords or playing them. Everything happens on-device, which means that the app also fully works offline. This is great for playing on the train or an airplane with no internet.
What are you waiting for? Get it now!
Creating an infinite amount of personalized crosswords, plus playing and sharing them is completely free. No ads. No tracking. No traps. Only some options and the file import are considered "pro features" and can be enabled for a small fee.
In Summary
- Customize with Ease
Choose from diverse topics. Add your own questions. Import them to save time. - Educational and Fun
Ideal for teachers and learners. With print-friendly sized exports. - Multilingual and Offline
Enjoy in 7 languages and create & play even with no internet connection.
Download and Explore
CrossCraft is available on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Silicon Macs. A native Mac app for all Macs is nearing completion and will follow soon.
Get the app now: 👇👇👇
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