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community weblog
New ways to be puzzled
The Daily Baffle is a free site with word and logic puzzles in several new-to-the-world formats.
Puzzle designers are always coming up with new kinds of puzzles, and I think this one has some really interesting takes. As a crossword fan and occasional constructor, Morphology -- with it's crossword-style clues and themes -- is the one that's up my alley (and today's happens to be by a very frequent contributor to New York Times crosswords, LA Times crosswords, and many other puzzle publishers).
Maybe my personal favorite thing about the site is that you can construct and submit Morphology puzzles, and get paid for them. I learned via crosswords that constructing is even more satisfying than solving. But diving right into crossword construction can be hard, and constructing a Morphology develops some of the same skills while being much easier.
Full disclosure: I've constructed and had two Morphology puzzles accepted, and in the process and since then, I conversed a fair bit online with the site creator/editor. But several months ago, I checked with the mods whether that was too close of a connection for a MetaFilter post, since I do also just think it's a cool site. They said to go ahead, with this disclosure, so I'm finally getting around to doing that.
P.S. Have we had a post about crossword construction, with links to guides and resources? Should I make one?
posted by daisyace on Apr 16, 2026 at 5:26 AM
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This is awesome, thanks for finding it!
I'm always looking for bite-sized daily puzzles.
(Also found on MeFi: Minute Cryptic)
posted by mmoncur at 6:21 AM
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I....give up on Megarubigram as soon as I rotated a couple of things. I would need whole hours to figure that out.
posted by numaner at 9:02 AM
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I would LOVE a FPP about crossword construction.
posted by kimberussell at 9:13 AM
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Oh thank God, I was worried I was going to get some work done today.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 9:18 AM
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Morphology was great fun.
The About doesn't say anything about AI; if this is all human-generated, it's even more impressive. (The About page does say "All our puzzle formats are original creations designed in a notebook in the spring of 2024." which delights me no end. Notebooks are the best.)
Thanks so much for sharing this, daisyace! What a lovely gift your post is.
posted by kristi at 10:42 AM
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Notebooks are the best.
Sure are!
posted by pwnguin at 12:12 PM
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I tried a few and these are hard. Good stuff. Standing ovation for them being free and no ads or other crap.
posted by zardoz at 1:53 PM
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What a nice reception (i.e., not the intimidating MetaFilter I've seen warnings about) -- thanks all. Glad you like the site too.
numaner -- yeah, the Megarubigram is way too hard for me, and I've seen some chat on the Discord group (The Daily Baffle) about how it's for the hardcore.
kristi -- I know he built the site before AI got good enough for vibe coding, and there isn't the kind of AI involved that you read about related to LLMs and deepfakes and data centers. But there is algorithmic generation of some of the puzzles, like there is for sudoku. Morphology and Triword are human-created. For Morphology, he made a tool that lets constructors search for words that are x morphs away from other words. Construction nonetheless involves lots of rabbit-holing down dead ends, and needing to back up and try other paths, using human judgement to find a nice, complete chain connecting your themers, with no gunky words and no excessively-large jumps. I imagine that could be facilitated by a more sophisticated tool, since crossword constructors already have scored wordlists that would let it avoid gunky fill. But if you could just input your theme words and the thing would generate candidate chains connecting them, I wouldn't love that.
Kind of related, the crossword construction community in general is both vehemently anti-AI-generated-crosswords, and also very avid users of tools that facilitate construction. No one (well, just about no one) is sitting there with graph paper and a dictionary. There are tools for when you're finding candidate theme words, tools for when you're creating your grid and (especially!) filling it, etc. While there are databases of clues that have appeared before, no one would use them instead of coming up with their own clues from scratch. One site advertises that you can, aimed more at people such as teachers making criss-cross puzzles (which are distinct from crosswords and trivial to construct). And it turned out that, of course, it's plagiarizing the clues, and constructors are pissed enough to give up a site that otherwise had been really useful in other ways. Constructing puzzles for publication still absolutely requires human creativity at every stage, but we all worry about whether it'll stay that way.
posted by daisyace at 3:08 PM
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I want more. Why can't I play archived puzzles?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:10 PM
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I find myself also struggle a lot with morphology, either I'm bad at words or the clues are not very clear. Like for today, the third clue was "It might be a lot?" and I did figure out Property just because of the puzzle mechanics, but that clue made me so doubtful I gave up and did a reveal because I was messing up further down and thought I got that wrong.
posted by numaner at 7:21 AM
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numaner, I suspected that clue from the surrounding answers but was baffled by it until I realized the pun -- "a lot" as in, like, "residentially zoned lot", "this house is on a 4 acre lot", "vacant lot", etc. YMMV on whether that makes it more justified or much, much less.
posted by dick dale the vampire at 9:21 AM
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I think most AI haters are perfectly fine with algorithmic construction assistance and the kind of crossword search tools that constructors use - there's still a human involved. Some of the best sudoku constructions have a clear, human-built solve path, especially with the modern sudoku tools that include things like 'fog of war', which cut down the amount of information you get to a very small part of the puzzle.
posted by Merus at 9:32 AM
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YMMV on whether that makes it more justified or much, much less.
Oh, it sounds like the site maybe hasn't made clear that a clue with a question mark -- borrowing from crossword cluing convention -- specifically indicates a pun or wordplay (or at least a phrase being used in an unconventional way, even if not quite punny). Clue #3 today feels a lot less unfair if you know ahead of time it's doing something tricky.
I like these. What I like most about crosswords is how you might have no idea at all about a whole slew of clues (being, say, no good with celebrity names, or sports, or geography, or even trivia in general), but how you can nonetheless usually work things out from all the crossing (often even where two things you don't know intersect, by virtue of, say, likely letter combinations, or etymological properties). To me, that's what transforms the whole thing into a proper puzzle, and not just a trivia quiz.
And so this reproduces that puzzly feeling, with the morphology shifts taking the place of the across/down interactions, and that's neat.
(I think I had the most trouble today with #11 -- until eventually focusing up and just looking at the morphology clues in both directions, filling in likely stable letters to get it finally started.)
posted by nobody at 12:10 PM
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Shouldn't #11 be just a +1, without the ~1?
Fun!
posted by snoboy at 4:01 PM
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