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The Crossee Story

As a casual solver of puzzles, I like the ‘quick solve’ format of the NYT Mini and Midi crosswords. The grids are small, and the clues are more focused on trivia instead of cryptic word play. I usually can finish one within 10 minutes, with the occasional one that takes around 15 minutes, tops.

However, I have always had one issue with these crosswords - the context. Being NYT, it focuses heavily, almost entirely, on America. While most of the times crossings and reasonable guesstimation can get me through a puzzle without any googling, on some days I get stuck enough to resort to the familiar search engine. But despite all that, the heavy focus on American culture (read my blog for an example) always leaves me with a sense of being an outsider. I have to look up trivia and facts which honestly I have no need for besides solving the crossword. And I pretty much forget what I had looked up too - there is no reason for persisting that in my memory - what do I do with it?

I heard my partner say something similar one day, and so I decided to make Crossee.

What is Crossee

Crossee is the same fast-solving crossword, but heavily based on the Indian context. Our movies, TV shows, people, cultural quirks, landmarks - and so on. I try to bring in humour in my clues as much as possible. If I can elicit a chuckle from you - I have succeeded.

About the name - it’s crossword + coffee. I love both, and I liked the image of solving one while sitting with a cup of your favourite beverage each morning.

Parts of a daily crossword

A crossword needs three things mainly - the clues, the wordlist and the grid builder.

Clues - I write each clue manually by hand. Even the clues that may look like English dictionary entries are handwritten. This is the core of what makes Crossee.
Wordlist - Crossee uses Princeton’s WordNet for English words. I have put together the list of India-specific words using a crawler and then manually curated the wordlist over several weekends.
Grid builder - I use software most days, the way most constructors do. Sundays are different.

The Sunday Crossee

The Sunday Crossee is hand-built - I start with a blank 9×9, come up with a theme, and build. Usually takes some time every day of the preceding week.

How the site is built

I am a Product Manager in my day job. So in the spirit of full disclosure, I have used AI to build this site and the way it looks - I came up with the ideas, AI came up with the code. The puzzles are a separate matter, described above.

Give it a shot, share your solve, leave a note about what you think.

Harshad Deshmukh
September 2026

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