Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle
Experience one of the top-rated Free games on the App Store, Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle! Developed by the innovative team at Almanaq LLC, this Puzzle game provides a unique gaming experience like no other. With a content rating of 4+, it’s perfect for a wide range of players. Since its initial release on 10th April 2012, the game has seen numerous updates, with the latest version launched on 9th September 2021.
Are you a fan of Puzzle, Word, or Books games? Then Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle is right up your alley! You won’t be able to resist its appeal.
User Ratings of Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle
Over 102 players have rated Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle. Join them and share your thoughts!
How Much Does Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle Cost?
Good news! You can download Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle on your iOS device absolutely free!
Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle Release Date
Eager to know when Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle first graced the App Store? It was launched on 10th April 2012.
When Was Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle Last Updated?
The latest version of Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle was updated on 9th September 2021, ensuring a more enjoyable gaming experience for all players.
Where Can I Download Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle?
To get started with Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle, head over to the official Apple App Store.
A Glimpse into Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle
Puzzazz’s ad-free bookstore has more FREE puzzles than ever, including new daily KenKen® and hand-crafted Sudoku puzzles. Solve the NYT Crossword¹ in the only app that presents the print edition faithfully—NYT editor Will Shortz says it’s the only app which is “able to handle almost any New York Times crossword trick.” Puzzazz’s award-winning TouchWrite™ handwriting recognition makes solving more fun, especially on small screens, the perfect icing for our unique, optimized user experience designed by puzzle lovers for puzzle lovers.
Puzzazz is “snazzy” (says the New York Times), “groundbreaking” (says WIRED), and “TouchWrite is an awesome technology” (says GeekWire). Reviewers think it is “fantastic,” the “best way to do the NYT,” and “Hands down the best crossword puzzle app.”
Browse our selection of more than a hundred ebooks of great hand-crafted puzzles of all types. Try the free puzzles in each ebook and then buy the rest if you like what you’ve solved. Puzzle ebook sales not only benefit our authors, but they allow us to keep the app free and ad-free with high-quality puzzles for everyone.
▶ We’ve got oodles of puzzles
Browse through thousands of puzzles by world-class authors–some of the best you’ll find anywhere—and solve hundreds of free puzzles. Try before you buy because every ebook starts with free puzzles!
From the NYT — Just enter your nytimes.com Crosswords subscription credentials to get started. Puzzles will download automatically each day when they are released.
From the web — Open puzzles directly from the web or email to solve in Puzzazz.
▶ The reviews are stellar
“The people at Puzzazz have been working hard on cultivating quality puzzles and developing TouchWrite, a groundbreaking new technology for doing puzzles on the screen.” —Wired
“Best APP Ever! The TouchWrite technology is perfect, especially when I use it on the phone.” —Jackleroy
“Fantastic puzzle app! Some things are actually better than solving on paper.” —Wendell O
“Best puzzle experience out there! The TouchWrite software alone puts Puzzazz way ahead of the field. I also love the selection of books—something to satisfy all types of puzzlers.” —puzzlefan1001
“Best way to do the NYT!” —derekallen7
“I specifically subscribed to NYT Premium crosswords because this app supports them.” —hightemp
▶ Our experience is optimized for you
Puzzazz is built with an eye toward how you solve puzzles, from our patent-pending TouchWrite handwriting recognition and Bluetooth keyboard support to on-screen keyboards designed specifically for different types of puzzles. Use your Apple Pencil or 3D Touch to quickly switch between “pen” and “pencil” input. If you’re left-handed or color blind, you’ll appreciate that we haven’t ignored you. Plus, Puzzazz supports Split View and Slide Over, allowing you to Google a clue (or watch a movie!) while solving a puzzle.
You can always see the complete puzzle, plus both Across and Down clues at the same time, no matter how you orient your device or which options you choose (like showing Answer Boxes). Puzzazz supports all of the tricks authors and editors like to use, like unusual grids or clues. You’ll appreciate automatic clue and cross-reference highlighting, easy rebus (multiple letter) entry, and the built-in hinting (with smart hinting for cryptics). Take notes on a clue or mark a cell. Time yourself if you want (you can compare your times on the puzzle leaderboards). Rate puzzles you solve and see how your ratings compare with others’.
Puzzazz’s powerful puzzle engine makes it the best app for all types of puzzles, many previously available only on paper, Puzzle types include crosswords, cryptic and variety crosswords, diagramless crosswords, acrostic, cryptogram, word, Sudoku, KenKen, logic, Mentagy, mystery puzzles, and many more. And check out the spectacular Year of Puzzles, Maze of Games, Cryptic All-Stars, and Variety Show.
¹ NYT Crossword subscription required
What’s New in the Latest Update?
Find out what’s new in the latest version of Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle updated on 9th September 2021:
Bug fix release.
6.2: Our popular Free Daily Sudoku puzzles now have a better difficulty ramp up from Monday to the weekend, matching the increasing difficulty of our Free Daily KenKen puzzles. We’ve improved the puzzle layout on newer iPhones with larger screens, and we adjusted the keyboard layouts to improve usability on all iPhones. We just released some new Sudoku and KenKen books. Check them out! To accommodate more new books, we’ve reorganized the bookshelf categories slightly.
User Reviews on Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle
Looking for more information? Read a comprehensive review of Puzzazz Crossword & Puzzle below:
Puzzazz is great for doing cryptic crosswords on. We’ve never encountered a bug on the app. Its super easy to browse and buy more puzzles. User interface is easy to figure out, and the layout is great. Our only request: can we have a dark mode option?
We are glad we can do puzzles daily in retirement. This is budget friendly for us.
Im was no longer able to download/open puzzles from Brendan Emmett Quigley; they always worked before (for years) and they open in the Crossword app. We got a message saying to contact the author, which we did. Author said Roy would look into it – we missed the reply message. Roy did respond and fixed the problem in a timely manner. Thank you very much!
This is the best app for crosswords we’ve ever found. Its very intuitive and easy to use. It makes our crosswords even more fun because it has all the preferences we could want, and it presents the grid just as it is in print. Its really the best crossword app on offer, and we’ve tried a LOT of them.
We somehow only discovered Puzzazz a year or so ago, but since then it’s been steadily feeding our cryptic crosswords addiction, and will do so until we run through the rest of its collection (an alarmingly close prospect). We dip occasionally into some of the many other kinds of puzzles it supports, typically regular crosswords and cryptograms, and we’ll probably branch out more once we run out of the cryptics. Fortunately, we can also import cryptics from elsewhere on the web, although the tools to do so are clumsy. Speaking of which, tools and controls in general are the iffiest part of this app. We wouldn’t go so far as to call the user interface unusable, but it is uncomfortable. Buttons are laid out in awkward formations. It’s difficult to see whether we’re writing in "pen" or "pencil," and we almost never manage to hit the control to switch between them on the first try. The handwriting recognition gets it wrong just a little bit too often to leave it turned on. And so forth. A small number of improvements could make the app vastly easier to use, but it’s clear they’re not going to happen at this stage. And yet that’s a relatively minor point, because the app is certainly usable, and more importantly, it can handle a remarkable range of puzzles, including a surprising amount of support for the unexpected curve balls puzzle builders like to throw at you. Its puzzle collections are easy to purchase and reasonably priced. (Why, though, why, why can it sync your purchases to other devices, but not your puzzle progress?) All in all, a bit of a pain in the neck to use but makes up for it by being terrific where it counts the most.
This is the best crossword and other puzzle app, in our opinion. The UI is really good – you can see the clues list and the grid in portrait mode even on a mini iPhone screen! And entering letters is very smooth with keyboard or pencil (or finger). It plays a nice hurrah sound when you finish. The puzzle books are good quality. We just wish it synced progress and/or imported puzzles between devices (could use iCloud???). For that reason, we still use the Standalone Crossword app sometimes, but it is unpleasant. Otherwise, Puzzazz would be 5 stars.
Puzzazz remains the app of choice for downloaded crosswords. Unfortunately, the NY Times no longer allows their puzzles to be downloaded to Puzzazz, so the app description is outdated in that respect. Plenty of other constructors download in . Puz format, so there is more than enough to work on. Our only gripe with the app itself is that it doesn’t sync across devices. If they could solve that, this would be a 5-star review. Come on guys, it can’t be that hard!
Enjoy the user interface and especially touch write with our Apple Pencil, works very well. However, once we finish a crossword, we wish it would play some music or do something visual or both indicate that we won The New York Times crossword app does this as well and we like it we like your app thats amazing volume of puzzles. Just give us a Tada or something when we win lol. We need that positive reinforcement. Also, is your integration with the New York Times permanently broken? Keep up the great work And maybe think about giving us some sort of spinning widgets and cheesy music when we win.
Not sure if the issue below was ever addressed – we gave up on that. But Im increasing our rating anyway because we’ve enjoyed the diagramless puzzles. New issue: Free Daily Sudoku has been broken for several days. Prior comments: we loved this app until we began trying to open many of the puz files we’ve collected over the years. It imposes limits on what files you can open. No NYT before 2013, and apparently no WSJ at all? We guess we just have to wonder every time we go to open a puzzle whether Puzzazz will accept it.
Sudoku hasnt worked since the end of January; now, the free daily KenKen is defunct as of July 1. Any hope of reviving them? We used to play both of these every day. And the overall app hasnt been updated in a very long time, which makes us hesitant to add any paid puzzle subscriptions wish there was any information forthcoming.
You can let the app developer know that this app doesnt comply with Googles embedded webview policy.
We’ve set the writing speed to slow, we’ve read the docs on how we should write the letters (which is a HUGE strike against the app – we have to write letters a specific way?) and it simply doesn’t work. No matter what we do, chances are if we need a straight line anywhere in the letter, it’s gonna show up as an "I" and if we need something round, it’s gonna be either an "O" or an "S". Apps like GoodNotes allow you to lift your pencil from the "page" – ie: normal writing – so it’s certainly possible from a technical standpoint. Why we’re stuck with something like TouchWrite that simply does not work is beyond us. If the devs want to address this or point out what we might be doing wrong, we’ll consider revising our rating but as it stands, the app is literally unusable with an Apple Pencil.
Ease of use = 0. Looked at the handwriting recognition guide and as soon we saw that they suggest you write the letter E like backwards 3 we came here to leave this review. Shameful. Lots of potential in the app, but the fact that we cant just sit down and intuitively write with the pencil is pathetic.
Vastly superior to Across Lite. Thank you Roy!
This is the best crossword puzzle app we have found. We like that you can see the whole puzzle and the keyboard at the same time, unlike other puzzle apps. You can try out a puzzle book before purchasing and there is a variety of difficulty levels. They have all sorts of word puzzles to choose from, though we personally just like crosswords. Our only fear is that we will run out of crossword books! Thank you for making this perfect app!
We were an hour into a 5-hour flight when we discovered our ebook hadnt downloaded correctly. Thank goodness our Puzzazz books worked perfectly. We recommend Puzzling Pairs, Drop Quotes, and Show us the Vowels to help the time fly.
We enjoy using Puzzazz on a daily basis. First of all, it’s a very good app for solving crosswords — we find it very easy to solve with the user interface, much easier than alternatives. It has handwriting recognition for those who like that, but even our slow typing is better than our bad handwriting. Puzzazz also does a great job with tricky crosswords that use "rebuses" (more than one letter in a square to solve). Puzzazz lets you solve puzzles that you buy in the app (I highly recommend the UK-style cryptic crosswords from The Nation), it lets you solve your NYT puzzles in Puzzazz (NYT puzzle subscription required), and it even lets you import other . Puz file crosswords into the app from independent crossword creators. For an app that brings a crossworder joy on a daily basis, it’s a wonderful bargain and we can’t recommend it enough.
We’ve tried many xword apps, and this is the best. We love the Touchwrite handwriting system. Stable, supports all kinds of variations and special features, occasional freebies… It has everything.
We have just started using this app and find it delightful. There is one improvement we would like to see – having the option to see one clue at a time. This would allow the keyboard to be bigger and allow more room for the grid as well. The NYTimes crossword app does this and on an iPhone with its screen its much easier to use.
Some freely puzzles. Would prefer subscription available to cover all puzzles. Im waiting for it!
We’ve been looking for a crossword app that works with Apple Pencil. Although this app offers writing recognition, it is FRUSTRATING to use. Resting your hand on the screen (which is natural) switches to another clue. Touching the Apple Pencil to the box switches between the horizontal and vertical clues. The app also has a hard time recognizing our writing, even after modifying our strokes per the suggestions in the help section. We hope they continue to update this app with better writing functionality. This app could be so great!
Its great for crosswords. Adding dark mode would bump this up to five stars in our opinion.
We find it clunky and hard to navigate. We cannot move very easily between across and down or between clues. Have to find and click on the arrows rather than swiping which is much more intuitive.
We saw an article online that said you could use the Apple Pencil with the crossword puzzles but you cant. It doesnt show what youre writing it just guesses a random letter and puts it in the square. We dont get why its so hard to make a crossword app that u can use the pencil in.
Downloaded to solve NYT crosswords, but the app does not support signing into NYT with a Google account. Attempting to do so gives a disallowed_useragent error so we can’t use our existing subscription.
We have used Puzzazz for years as our go-to crossword app, on both an aging iPad and our iPhone. Works great. And we are a big fan of drawing the letters with our fingers (though there is a keyboard available as well). It works great for the New York Times puzzle, as well as puzzles we download from independent creators. It also works for a bunch of other kind of puzzles But we havent tried much of that yet.
We’ve stopped using all the other apps for puzzles. No matter what your style, this app will work well for you. The support is fantastic.
Great app. Still think the Rebus key should be smaller and Backspace larger.
All our purchased KekKen games disappeared after the last update! How do we recover them? Was unable to select a subject in the drop down bar to submit this to the developer. This is our first glitch in this app – otherwise – we LOVE THIS APP!
It took a little practice with the Apple Pencil to get the letters right consistently but it works great now! We love the variety of puzzles and the fact that we can do one or two in each book before deciding whether to buy the book or not. We’ve always enjoyed crossword puzzles in paper form but not so much on the iPad until we discovered Puzzazz. Being able to write in the answers as opposed to typing on a little keyboard, makes it perfect for us.
We use this for The NY Times crossword and it works great.
The app itself is well-designed and useful, but the unique Year of Puzzles book is what gets this five stars. We are in the midst of solving it and it is an absolute blastso clever and different. We’ve grown a bit tired of the daily NYT Crossword, and this is the antidote. It will really get the juices flowing. Check it out!
The support for puz files is also amazing! Im primarily a keyboard user, but the note taking is simple and the answer entry fairly straightforward. We only have a few improvements we would make: Add more cell markup options (maybe 8 other colors for shading? For sudoku, we like both center and corner notes too, but that sounds harder from a software perspective) Add more varied puzzle books! We havent found any killer or sandwich sudoku books yet (please prove us wrong, we have cash in hand!) and the Maze of Games is an amazing conversion, so we know this software can handle it! An idea of what books have been added when so we can see the cool new books Im missing.
We love this App. Loved the Sudoku. April 1 ended the puzzles. What happened?
Puzzazz offers great puzzles and a variety of ways to solve them. If you want to type in the answers you can. We prefer to use the TouchWrite method using our finger for crosswords. The developer is incredibly responsive and helpful. Great app!
We’ve been using Puzzazz for ages, and realized Id never told anyone how GREAT it is. We especially love the cryptic crosswords, because it gives us the divisions and clue types if we need them but only if we need them.
About the only real suggestion we have for the developers is that we wish there were puzzles besides crosswords for the Puzzle Downloads area. Otherwise, this app is perfect. You don’t have to waste money on books that aren’t at your level because you can try a puzzle(s) for free in each, and the $3 asking price a toss is quite reasonable for the quality of the brain teasers you get. Thumbs up!
We got this specifically to use with our pencil, but the letter recognition is still so poor and extremely frustrating. The crosswords specifically barely recognize letters unless its an L, O or I. We followed instructions with how to best write out letters but it still barely worked. 90% of the time trying to write a letter just made the box switch from the across clues to the down clues.
Idk why they stopped updating KenKen, but we enjoyed it while it lasted. The sudoku is pretty good too. Expensive to buy all the packs though.
Dont even bother if you are left handed and using the TouchWrite feature. All in all, bad experience.
This app has lots of bugs and is frustrating to use. Seems it always wants to take you to a different cell as soon as you attempt to put a number down in the daily sudoku game.
We have at length looked for tutorials of how to use the Apple Pencil with the different puzzles on Puzzazz but have yet to find one, and while most of the writing technique is pretty intuitive, Im extremely frustrated that there is not an easily find-able guide to how to write letters and numbers for each type of puzzle and what might be the most efficient way to use the Pencil on each puzzle. The only reason to use this app is because you want to utilize your Pencil while playing games making the omission of a help section especially problematic, hence the one star review. It would be a five star review if this matter was addressed.
We enjoy using this app for the most part, but the free daily sudoku and kenken puzzles arent working. The newest ones are from April 1st. Are you not planning to update them anymore? Update: The available free puzzles are slowly dwindling away with no new ones added. Very disappointing. :(
It’s one giant advertisement. Don’t waste your time.
A month ago we would have rated this puzzle app 10 stars. Not now. Daily puzzles stopped on 4/1/18. Deleted (which deleted all puzzle history) and reinstalled and still wont restart daily puzzles. Please fix. UPDATE. Zero stars. No response from developer.
Well, our first review lamented the lack of Apple Pencil use but now that we’ve figured it out (You may want to include instructions)…. Its still so lackluster. The letter recognition is poor and theres no place for notes. Back to crossword PDFs again…
Not only is the app well designed and superbly functional, but the app support is outstanding. We submitted a question, and the next day we had a response and a solution. Much appreciated!
We liked the old Puzzazz with the free puzzles. The new one is great but we miss the puzzles that curved — not spirals.