Projects
Word puzzles, crosswords, interactive fiction, and data-driven tools — here are some projects I’ve built and written in the Puzzles & Games space.
Letter Purrfect
Daily word game · 2026–present
Letter Purrfect is a cozy daily word game reminiscent of a crossword mini with a Spelling Bee twist. I envisioned it as a bite-size puzzle meant to appeal to crossword solvers, but with a different type of check on each square and a unique “aha moment.”
I created and developed the concept, built the web app, and write each day’s puzzle by hand; the illustrious Anna Hurley provided the cat art. I also send out a weekly newsletter with constructor notes, bonus answers, and game development insights.
Crosswords
Crossword construction · 2020–present
I write crosswords for a wide variety of publications:
- 200+ full-size crosswords for the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Apple News+, Defector, AVCX, Puzzmo, etc.
- Mini crosswords for Yahoo and SFGATE
- Tournament crosswords for Boswords and Westwords
- Commercial campaigns for T Brand
- Contributions to books such as A24’s 99 TV Crosswords and the Hachette series Grids Just Wanna Have Fun (’80s), New Grids on the Block (’90s), and Grids Don’t Lie (’00s)
Spread the Word(list)
Tools for constructors · 2021–present
Spread the Word(list) is a free suite of tools for crossword construction that Brooke Husic and I launched in 2021 and continue to expand, with the goal of helping new constructors create clean and accessible crosswords.
The tools are widely used by the crossword community and include a data-informed wordlist, an answer search tool to see historical occurrences, and a visualizer that loads a crossword file and highlights its answers according to various attributes.
The Imposter
Interactive fiction piece · 2018
A man wanders the streets of Paris after a personal tragedy.
The Imposter is a piece of interactive flash fiction I wrote in the Windrift framework, where the story advances as you choose words inside the prose itself rather than from a menu of actions.
It was entered in Spring Thing 2018 and is listed on IFDB. It’s free to play on this site.
IF Recommender
Game recommendation app · 2026–present
I built an IF Recommender as a Gradio app that provides a list of recommended interactive fiction games based on an input game, author, reviewer profile, or “vibe” of favorite systems, genres/tags, and authors.
A deep learning framework runs each input through a two-tower encoder to pull a longlist of candidates from a shared embedding space, then scores each candidate against the query with a cross-encoder.
The data comes from IFDB via quarterly database dumps published to the IF Archive, with a usable index of ~10K games.