Word search puzzles are among the most incredible fun activities that almost everyone remembers from their childhood. Just like jigsaw puzzles and Sudoku, they aren’t too hard, and are very satisfying to solve, and have exciting and entertaining themes.
Most adults prefer playing word puzzles in magazines and newspapers. However, to make this fun to the next level, you can create your word search puzzles and use them to challenge a family member or friend. Even better, if your friends also know how to do these puzzles, both of you can create them and have fun. Creating word puzzles isn’t too demanding: it’s simple.
Here are steps you can follow to create your word search puzzle.
1. Select a Theme
You can get inspiration from many places. The environment, animals, movies, states, or even countries can be used to source ideas. Let your motivations, preferences, and likes to guide you in selecting your best idea.
2. Decide on the Number of Hidden Words and Size of Your Grid
Just like selecting a theme offers you various choices, you can also be flexible with this. You only need to remember to make your puzzle a square and not too small because it may limit the number of words you’ll choose. If you intend to use long words, use a larger grid. The number of words you intend to use will also affect the size of the grid. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, you want to start by writing down the numbers first before making the grid.
3. Draw the Grid
To draw your grid, you’ll need a graph paper or any other kind of ruled paper and a pencil or pen. Once you’ve removed it, pick your theme words and start filling them in. You can fill these words in eight different ways through these four main options, which you can also invert. You can spell your words from left to right, top to bottom, diagonally right to left, and diagonally left to right. Also, you can spell them backward in all those directions. Jumble the words within your theme and start writing them in whichever way you like. Depending on your preferences, you can choose to overlap or not.
4. Determining Difficulty Levels and Filling in the Grid
Filling in the grid requires extra effort, and that’s why it shouldn’t be larger than 14 x 14. This work is pretty simple. You need to put a letter in all the blank spaces. You can use various options to fill in the grid and determine its difficulty level. For example, you can only fill in the letters present in the theme words or add other additional letters to give partial solutions or write the words ‘E-L-E’ in the puzzle to provide the players with hints of the information out for.
The Bottom-line
If you love playing word search puzzles, you can create your own word search in Google sheet and try to use it to challenge others. You can make playing more fun by asking your friends also to create puzzles which you can swap. These simple steps can help you create exciting word search puzzles.
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