Alphique Rules
- Unique letters in each row
- Unique letters in each column
- Grid size: 6x6 to 10x10
- Number of letters: 6 to 10 (depends on grid size)
- Adjacent letters form words, acronyms, abbreviations, slang, and proper nouns.
- Words are read left to right and top to bottom
- Unique words for 3 letters or higher
- Two letter combos occasionally duplicate
Uniqueness
Each row and column can not have repeat letters. Words should not also be repeated. This is the tie-in to being like Sudoku. While signficant effort is made to prevent the two letter combos from repeating, they can easily slip by when I succeed at getting two large words running adjacent to one another. Given that figuring out the large words is arguably more fun than the filler words, I will let the two letter repeats slide occasionally when building the puzzles.
Sizing
The grid sizes are going to range in the 6x6 to 10x10 range. While a non-square puzzle has not been made yet, there is nothing preventing a board to be 6x10. The number of letters used will match the largest dimension of the puzzle, and there is guaranteed to be at least one word using all the letters. While it does happen, it is very rare that there are multiple words that use all the letters. In one super rare case, there were 4 words. I was flabbergasted. I could only get 3 of them in, but in the event that there are multiple max letter words, as many of them as possible are going to be used.
Words
Words are read left to right and top to bottom, but it's not just words. As it turns out, making these puzzles is quite difficult. To achieve a decent density of letters in the puzzle, acronyms and abbreviations are a must. Automatic abbreviations: Every state in the USA (Developer's American) and the periodic table. So yes, SB is valid, because that's element 51: Antimony. Otherwise, I tried to stick to relatively common abbreviations you may come across, like ST for street, or the alphabet soup organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency or the United Nations.
Because most two letter combos and some three letter combos can likely be something you haven't heard of nor would think of off hand, it is recommended to try and save those for the very end. These often can be swapped to provide a valid solution, so wasting hints on them because they're not the identified solution is not helpful.
All these puzzles are handcrafted. There are presently 17,957 "words" in the list of 145,000 english words that are 10 or less unique letters. A free list of words was found online, and it did include a lot of proper nouns and slang. I do not necessarily know what these words mean as I build the puzzles, but as I come across things that fit, I do look them up and curate the list. I was very surprised to find things missing like HIM and was confused what xiv was until I discovered my list counted to 100 in roman numerals. There are also a lot of proper names of famous scientists, presidents, countries, cities, etc. While these are not meant to be in the list of acceptable words, you can probably get away with it for a bit. Reading through each entry and then doing a google search on every unknown thing is not on my priority list (though I did for all 2 and 3 letter entries).
Being that these are handcrafted, and I do lookup unknown things, I keep the words relatively kid friendly in a PG/PG-13 sense. However, there is nothing stopping them from entering inappropriate entries to fill the board. If they typed it, they already knew it. They aren't getting it from here. Some words have been manually removed from the word list as I don't even want to accidentally have it accepted when building the puzzle. If I notice potential for problematic words being displayed on the screen, I'll often provide starting hints to make the word not fit anywhere.