Instructables Puzzle

I made a puzzle for Instructables. You can choose if you only want to solve this puzzle or that you want to make this type of puzzle yourself. If you only want to solve the puzzle, you can best do that before you read the next steps, because in the next steps I describe how I made this puzzle, so there you already see where the words are hidden.

Probably many people already know how to solve this type of puzzle. Just find the words that are hidden there and the remaining letters form the solution. Words can be written top-down, bottom-up, left to right, right to left or diagonally. Letters can be used more than once. You can use the list of hidden words shown in the next step, but you can also make it more challenging by not looking at the list of words. I used one word that is not in English. It is the Dutch word for this type of puzzle.

After solving this puzzle I suggest that you also try to create such a puzzle yourself. It is also a kind of puzzle to create this type of puzzle.

Here is the list with hidden words. You can use it to check if you found every word.

It is fun to create this type of puzzle and to ask other people to solve your puzzle. The benefit of making the puzzle yourself is that you decide which words will be used. I choose to use words related to the Instructables website, but you can pick any topic you want. Start by just writing down some words you want to use and write the words in the available cells. You decide how large your puzzle will be. Of course it gets harder when it gets larger.

If you are studying a foreign language I suggest that you try making the puzzle in that language. I experienced that it is more difficult to do that, as I am not a native English speaker. Just because it is also possible to mix languages in the puzzle, I used one word in Dutch. I marked it yellow in the screenshot above.

I made a list of words that I could use and I made them red when I really used them. When the puzzle is more than half filled with words, you will notice that it becomes harder to fit additional words, so some words in black letters I had to delete because I could not fit them anywhere. Using some of the letters from a word that was already there makes the puzzle more interesting. Be careful with using short words of just three or four letters, because it can happen that the short word you are adding, is already present just as a combination of letters from multiple words you have already placed. I recommend that you check if your short word is already present somewhere by searching for the first letter of your word and see if anywhere in the square the word is present. Theoretically this could also happen with longer words but that chance is very, very small.

With some open cells left over, it becomes a challenge to think of an additional word. For example: Try to think of a word related to Instructables or related to the topic that you picked and to fit the word it has to start with an S, then you can choose 2 letters, then there is a R and after that there is an E. The word "share" would fit there, but if that word was already used in the list, you have to think of another word.

It is best to leave some places open and to add the solution there. In my puzzle I marked them in yellow. Then you can count the number of open places and you have to add a solution to your puzzle by making a word or a sentence that has exactly that amount of letters. You can see my solution on the last photo.

Have fun.