Last updated on January 17th, 2026 at 01:36 am
Crostix Free – Word Game Review
Crostix Free is a Word game from Brian Mountford, first launched in 4th June 2009.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 22+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Crostix Free Stand Out
Welcome to the world of acrostics! An acrostic, also called a crostic or double crostic, is a cousin of crossword puzzles, with clues and answers whose letters are rearranged to form a quote from a famous (or not-so-famous) author. If you're familiar with acrostics, you will quickly see how convenient they are on the iPhone, because letters are automatically copied to the correct place as you type them in.
Crostix Free is a free version of our Crostix application, containing sample puzzles from our library. Try them out, and if you like them, get the full version, with 150 puzzles, from easy to fiendishly hard, or just buy more in Crostix Free using in-app purchase.
The program has all the features you'd expect:
- get hints for a single letter or an entire word,
- see your score, based on how many hints you needed,
- change the font size by pinching,
- rotate the device as you like, and
- get help on all program options.
If you're new to the world of acrostics, the application also includes a short description to get you started. More tutorials about acrostics are available on our Web site.
This Word game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Crostix Free is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 17th December 2016
Recent improvements include:
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.
Three new books! Crostix Books 12 and 13, and a second book of Larry Katzman's Gaglines puzzles. Updated for iOS 10. Unfortunately, that also means you will need at least iOS 8 to run this new version. Our apologies to those using older devices.
But most importantly, we hope that this new version fixes the evil and long-standing bug which caused the app to be stuck in "Waiting for Data" mode for new books. Let us know if you still have problems with this; fixing it is our number one priority.
Download & Availability
Crostix Free is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We love these puzzles! Some of them are pretty tough, and we have to ask the Internet, but then we do our best to remember and voil Ive learned something new! Heres a quick tip for those of you who have finished them and want to start again. Just uninstall then reinstall the app. When it prompts you to buy puzzles, click already purchased and you can restore them, blank and ready to go again.
We love that we can see the clues and the puzzle at the same time and the size is easy to read. The clues are challenging, but not impossible. We dont consider it cheating to use the internet and a few hints!! Hours of enjoyment for the price.
Just right in difficulty for us. Love the literary sensibility of the quotes. The letter hints are a big help.
Nice layout and nicely challenging. Welcome spread from easier to harder. Well worth the $.99. Only real disappointment is that the explanation of the source of the quote is often minimal, sometimes not even mentioning the book.
Love acrostics? Get this app. Easy to use, lots of books (you'll totally get $.99 worth of enjoyment out of each).
Clues are way too hard, even for easiest sample puzzles!! Bummer because we really like the apps layout and design! 4 stars for everyone better than us!! We cant even get it by doing the quote without using many hints!! Recommend a super easy level. Developers are obviously wow smart ;-).
Our only problem with this app is that we ran out of puzzles months ago, and they only added more very recently. For some reason, we couldn't buy the new puzzles on our old downloaded version even though we updated it, so we had to download another copy. Since it's free, that's not a big problem. Anyway, we have loved doing crostics for many years, and was very pleased to find an app for them. It works fine on our rather old iPad.
We like games like this anyway to try to keep our "brain age" down, but this one is so much fun! Thanks.
Very nice game. The one small change it needs is to stop the words on the grid from wrapping.
After a lot of trying to update and failed updates it is now working. Trying to do update and get the message Item no longer available. Now is it gone or is there really an update.
We used to do the quote puzzle in the Chicago Sunday magazine. That was discontinued long ago…it's great to find these kinds of puzzles again.
We love this app, it is highly addictive.
These puzzles are somewhat like crossword puzzles but more fun, interesting, and entertaining They're challenging, fun, educational, and so rewarding when you solve. The quotes are interesting, and our problem solving skills run wild trying to find answers to the clues to crack the quote. The available hints keep us sane when the going gets rough. We just hope the puzzles will never come to an end.
We've always enjoyed this type of puzzle . They are so clever and challenging.
We love this app! Nice twist on standard crosswords, well designed with clever puzzles. Keep them coming.
We love the puzzles. They're well chosen quotes from a wide range of literature. We love it when we solve one. We just wish we could access them when we want to. When we open the app, in only about 30% of instances does it open successfully to a crostic. The rest of the time it crashes. Fix this problem and our rating goes to 5 stars.
This game is unfinished. Layout is horrible. Punctuation missing within quote. The idea is to challenge ones use of the English language, not teach a new way to use it.
Love this app!!! Waiting anxiously for more puzzles.
Great fun. Keep the new ones coming.
Love crostix & doing them on the iPad is a real treat. Like the latest change to show all of quote. Thanks.
We have downloaded all their books, and which there were more.
We like the game but the keyboard is too big you can't see the quotation. It would be perfect with a smaller keyboard.
This would be good if you could see the whole quote without it wrapping around. It's very difficult t see what you are doing.
Good challenging puzzles. Convenient navigation. Cursor arrows we corner really help get around.
Wah! We've done all the crostix and bought the extras and did those too and we're hopelessly addicted! These are fantastic! But what am we to do now that we've done them all?! Very nice app, some were quite challenging, especially those 'fiendish' ones. Give us more.
We like this game well enough and would like to purchase the full version, but compared to other apps in the iTunes store, $3.99 is too steep for the number of puzzles you get. We'll wait for the price to go down or the number of puzzles to increase greatly. We do like the way it plays, though. Nice work.
We figure that every game should get a glowing review from its own developer. After all, if you can't please yourself, who can you please? So here it is, on the very first day of availability on the App Store. Wonderful! Amazing! Mind-blowing! Non-stop word puzzle action! We can't wait for the full version, with over a hundred puzzles.
These are fun games – challenging and enjoyable. If you have never played them they are better than regular crosswords. Try the free ones they, do a good job. Check out their website. We even bought their book.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 3.3
- Size: 23.97 MB
- iOS: 8.0 or later
- Languages: EN, ES
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Brian Mountford
Last updated: 17th December 2016 | Genre: Word | Developer: Brian Mountford