When you are doing a titled crossword puzzle (as the NYT does on Sundays but not on weekdays), it’s sometimes a challenge to make the title reflect the them of the puzzle without giving away too much info. However, if you are lucky you can use it instead to inspire and provide coherence to the puzzle. This is one of those — I chose the title first, and then forced the rest of the puzzle to conform to the provided template. The result may be an “oh, yeah” moment, or a “yeah, just as I expected” reaction, but it should come out feeling like a complete well-rounded package.

Since this blog, and all the free puzzles on it, exist largely to promote a product, I should point out that the CrossFire Crossword Maker made it particularly easy to execute a theme of this sort. Since circles and rebuses are supported at every level, it was trivial to add the circles and include them in the .PUZ files and printable images. Further, the powerful word search features made it easy to find just the right entries to make an interesting theme. (Needless to say, it was also invaluable in building the grid, filling it, and creating a good set of clues.) If you’ve found yourself looking at our humble offerings and saying: “I could do better than that”, why not download a trial copy and try doing just that. It’s probably easier than you think.

Title: Social Circles
Difficulty: Wednesday
Download: Across Lite or printable PNG (w/ solution)

We’re posting this puzzle an hour early so that it will still by ST PAT’s day. But that’s not the only thing special about this puzzle. Put away your green beer and get out your four-leaf clovers, ’cause you may need all the luck you can get for this one. In response to audience demand, we’ve changed things up and made this puzzle annoyingly hard. Then again, in response to *other* audience demand, we’ve kept it just like it’s always been. The net result is that there are two versions of the puzzle: the hard one, which you’ll find in the applet above (unless you are in a non-java-capable browser or RSS reader) will hopefully annoy you; the easy one, which you can get by downloading the across lite puzzle or the PNG image, should be exciting yet comfortable. You can pick one or the other, or you can print out the easy version and use it to help you over the humps as you work the hard version on-line.

We’d love to hear whether you prefer the easy version, the hard version, or both. If you don’t want to comment for the whole world to see, you can always mail us.

In yet more exciting news, Beekeeper Labs is pleased to announce that it has just release version 1.1 of the CrossFire crossword maker. Amongst other new features, this release makes it much easier to create puzzles like this one, and gives customers access to the on-line solving applet that is used above. If this sounds exciting, you can download a trial version at the above link.

Title: Emerald Isle
Difficulty (hard): You tell us
Download (hard): Across Lite or printable PNG (w/ solution)
Difficulty (easy): Tuesday
Download (easy): Across Lite or printable PNG

We apologize for the lack of a puzzle in this post, but we want to take a moment to put on our other hats as representatives of Beekeeper Labs, and point out a new page/application that we just put up over on our main site.  KnotWize is  a nifty little interactive Java applet that lets you create and modify celtic knotwork designs (like the one you see here).  It’s colorful, configurable, and free to use — and the designs you create are (of course) yours to use as you like.  Make picture frames, cross-stitch designs, or just hypnotic mazes to mystify your dog, cat, or 5-year-old.

Don’t worry, though, we haven’t forgotten that this blog is supposed all about crosswords –  you’ll get your usual fix on Wednesday with no commercial interruptions.