Small Puzzles, Big Ambitions: A Conversation with Malaika Handa
Following the standard rules of crossword construction, how many 7x7 puzzles are mathematically possible?
Malaika Handa had that exact question, and with help from Quiara Vasquez, she calculated the answer: 312. That number also happens to be 6 times 52: one puzzle, six days a week, for one year. With that happy coincidence, 7xwords was born. Malaika put all the grids on a website and asked for volunteers to fill their favorite ones. Today, 7xwords is going strong: more than 180 novice and experienced constructors alike have signed on to create grids for the yearlong project.
I caught up with Malaika, a New York-based programmer by day, to chat about 7xwords’ success, grid aesthetics, and what the puzzle world and the tech world have in common.
BW: How long have you been solving puzzles, and how long have you been constructing them?
MH: I’ve been solving for maybe a year and a half, and I’ve been constructing since about October. So when this project started — obviously it was a ridiculous thing for me to do, to promise a year’s worth of puzzles when I’d only been constructing for two or three months! It’s been a weird experience to have people send me their drafts and expect me to play this editorial role.
Early on, in the very beginning of January, I had a pretty intense conversation with my older sister about what my goals were as the curator of these puzzles, which is a word that I like better than editor. One thing about crossword editors, it’s their job to make sure that every puzzle that’s a part of their publication has the same vibe. If I gave you a USA Today crossword and didn’t tell you it was a USA Today crossword, you’d still know. And the same is true of The New York Times, and other places as well. But that’s not really what I wanted to do with 7xwords, because I think what makes it cool is that everyone has their own vibe. I was trying to let people’s voices come through as much as possible, and if that meant including pop culture references that I knew nothing about, or including languages that I don’t speak — that felt like something this project could be good for.
So as the curator of 7xwords, what does the process of scheduling and wrangling this project look like for you?
I have a dedicated 7xwords email where people send their puzzles, and I also have a form where you can request a date. And for a while, the form was popping off! I would get, like, ten requests a night, which was a lot to deal with. That’s kind of slowed down now that all the easy grids are taken. So people will send me a draft of their puzzle, I solve it – I don’t look at the grid [first] or anything, because I want to know what the solving experience is like. Then I identify any notes I had – it could be a clue I really loved, or a clue I’ve never heard of, or a crossing that was hard for me. I think a lot of times the constructor benefits from knowing those things, even if they don’t make any changes because of it.
What has the response to the 7xwords project from the crossword community been like?
The response was overwhelmingly huge. It was many, many, many more people than I thought would be interested in contributing a puzzle, but also solving the puzzles. I think I get about 100 solvers a day, which for me is a lot, a lot, a lot. I’m also learning about the different platforms that people puzzle on: I’m very tapped into crossword Twitter, but I didn’t know about the crossword Reddit or the crossword Discord until I was suddenly getting emails that were like, “I’ve heard about your project on this platform!” So that was exciting.
Which particular 7xwords puzzles, either ones that are coming up or that have already been published, are you especially excited about?
Along with learning about all the different crossword platforms, there are all these different crossword puzzle things that I totally didn’t know about. Cryptics were super new to me, and pangrams are also a thing that people really like. We’ve got a 7x7 pangram coming up, which was hard and exciting. We’ve got a few vowelless puzzles queued, and someone is doing a puns and anagrams puzzle. There have been a few grids with circled letters, which is always fun, and then there’s also a rebus puzzle for later in the year, which I won’t reveal too much about. People are really going all out with how much fun you can pack into a 7x7 grid.
What do you think makes the 7x7 puzzle such an appealing thing for constructors and for solvers?
One thing that’s appealing is just the size of them. You can put a 7x7 together in half an hour. It’s not an intimidating project. And I think it’s a nice palate cleanser for people who are working on 15x15s all the time. It’s like, “Oh, these things can be small and cute and fun as well!” And then, especially as more and more people have been going to the website, it’s fun to see your name there. Even I have fun with it – some of my favorite constructors have contributed, and I get to see my name alongside theirs! I think that’s really exciting, and I think a lot of new constructors feel the same way, where they feel like they’ve been published. And it’s maybe a much lower barrier to getting published than any other location.
7xwords is a lot more streamlined and aesthetically sleek than a lot of indie crossword sites. Is there something that attracts you to the aesthetic side of crossword puzzles? Because a lot of crossword people don’t construct or solve or think about puzzles with a grid-first or grid-forward approach.
The aesthetic was what caused me to build this site – what motivated a lot of this, along with the happy coincidence that the math works out to exactly six puzzles. If you look at my Twitter profile, my cover image right now is a very early version of what is now the website. I was arranging all of these grids, and I was like, “Oh, what if you click on these? What would that look like?”
I started doing all of this back in December, and I had only really constructed themed puzzles before. So for me, laying out a grid looked like this: you put in your theme answers, and then you make the black squares work around that. Themeless constructing is something I don’t have a ton of experience with, and it’s so different: you might lay out the grid first, or maybe you have a few seed entries. But you’re definitely focused more on the aesthetic of the grid. So I thought 7xwords was interesting because you start only with the grid. You aren’t really building anything around a seed entry. You just have all the black squares already there.
I really like to arrange a grid that I think would be interesting, and then not actually fill it, because I don’t have time to! But it’s like a little fidgeting habit, you know? When I’m watching TV or something, I’ll just play around with CrossFire and lay out a grid that I think would be super weird or different or interesting, and then never actually follow through with it.
Of the 7x7 puzzles, are there any particular shapes or configurations that are your favorites?
I am very particular to the ones with not a lot of corners – the ones that look Z-shaped, or ones that have the black squares arranged into a rectangular pattern rather than a steps-and-stairs pattern. I really like the March 12th grid, which Sid [Sivakumar] has. And then the November 21st is a really pretty one. I definitely think some are prettier than others, but I also cannot explain why. My other favorite one is the caterpillar grid, which we just had on February 2nd.
Because of rotational symmetry, all of these grids happen twice, and some four times. For example, the one you see on February 2nd, which is the two caterpillars saying hello, comes back a few times: one way, then upside down, then mirror image, then mirror image upside down. Obviously there’s some exceptions. Anything with diagonal symmetry is only going to show up twice. If you look at October 20th, there’s only going to be one of those, because it has up-down and left-right symmetry.
And have you found that they present different challenges for a constructor based on the different shapes? How does the constructing process change based on the puzzle shape?
I think the two main challenges are, first, the super open grids are surprisingly hard. Like I said, one thing that makes these super accessible is that they are so small, but with some of these grids, you have a stack of 6/7 [letter words]. That’s actually really hard to fill well and make fun, keeping the audience in mind. Nobody is really logging on to spend an hour on a 7 by 7!
And then the other challenge is the grids that are super closed-off with a ton of 3-letter words. It’s hard to keep things interesting when you have ten 3-letter words in such a small space. So there are a few ways to handle that. One possibility is, I’ve been giving those grids to people who have never made a puzzle before, because that’s such a nice, gentle way to learn. And then the other thing is to use exciting letters. I think for one of those, I had triple-checked squares. In the January 12th puzzle, I have a word going across diagonally. Those letters are all triple-checked, because they’re checked down, checked across, and then checked diagonally. So that was one way to make that puzzle more interesting.
I find that crossword constructors like giving themselves extra challenges and extra constraints.
I definitely think that that is true. I’ve gotten very obsessive about constructing, and when I first started constructing, it was such a rush to have this new, exciting activity. Then when you construct for three hours a day for a few months, it’s no longer new and exciting. So you have to keep coming up with new ways: is it going to be cryptic clues? Is it going to be putting five themers into a puzzle? Is it going to be diagonal symmetry? There’s all these things you can do.
My most recent puzzle, which is now out on the internet, is the epitome of that: okay, I’ve made crossword puzzles. I want to make a different kind of thing now, that’s still a crossword puzzle. And so I made this escape room-esque puzzle. Someone else compared it to a puzzle hunt-style puzzle. But I started out with a crossword, and I was like: how much can I manipulate, and hide, and put in a treasure box, this puzzle, where people still want to solve it?
It’s interesting to compare my tech world to my crossworld, especially since I have a tech Twitter account and a crossword Twitter account, so I can truly just flip between them in a second. One thing that happens a lot in tech is, if you see something very cool, you want to also make it. Even the littlest things, like if on someone’s personal website they have a little mouse effect when you move the mouse, you’re like – can you also make that? That is something that I’ve taken into crossword construction. This puzzle I just made, it’s called “I Fold,” and in essence I did Erik Agard’s puzzle called “Clip Show.” I did it, and I was like: OK, I want to make a puzzle like that! And so I did that.
I also think in tech, or at least the circles that I run in tech, there is a push to make everything open-source, with community contributions. So why would I embark on this project to create 312 puzzles and not ask people to help me out? Obviously I would ask them to help. But maybe that is more of a tech thing.
I think computer science has this aspect of inventing a problem so that we can have fun solving it. Let’s take a problem that doesn’t really need to exist at all, but won’t we be able to have some fun with it? A lot of puzzling is doing that too, reverse-engineering a problem. On the crossword Discord the other day, they were talking about the people who get really into crosswords, and it’s programmers and musicians. For some reason, that’s it! Who knows why.
What else do you think that the crossword world could take from the world of tech and computer science, or vice versa?
What I’ve found is that people get really, really excited and obsessive about things in the tech world and also in the crossworld. That thought of that “I love this thing, and it’s my favorite pastime, and so I want to teach other people how to do it as well.” That definitely exists in both.
I also think the idea of riffing back and forth off of each other’s ideas is a really fun thing. Brooke Husic and Sid Sivakumar posted a themeless with an interesting grid, and then Brooke and Brian Thomas refilled that exact same grid, as a remix. I thought that was a super cool idea.
Chris Piuma had one puzzle where they had Brooke Husic do what they called a “guest verse.” They had Brooke do the inner part of the puzzle, and then Chris did the outer part of the puzzle. So I just think – innovation, is that the right word? Or just having fun with that sort of thing.
I really like your pinned tweet, which shows Paolo Pasco telling you: “[I] love the Venn diagram overlap between crossword Twitter, programming Twitter, and dumb bit Twitter.”
Yeah, like: how far can I take this idea which I came up with at three in the morning in someone else’s DMs? And now here we are.
