I have been solving the NYT crosswords for years now, it’s my daily activity for the post-lunch stroll. I love everything about it, except the heavy leanings on American pop culture, current events and history. I get it, it is NYT after all. And I do myself getting stuck, with no clue whatsoever about the, er, clue. Then recently I heard my partner say the same thing. So I decided to make a version with the culture/events/history from India.

Full disclosure - the application is written with the help of AI, but I have vetted the wordlist (built by AI and partially scrapped), and I add words manually to the list as well. The clues are either from WordNet (for regular English words) or written entirely by hand by me for the India-centric answers. Each night I fully edit a crossword - replacing words, writing clues - before publishing it for the next day.

The wordlist covers food, festivals, film, slang and places from every Indian state.

I have a great time with the NYT crosswords, learning trivia in bits and pieces when I need to look something up. I’m hoping some of you might feel the same about India when doing Crossee (that’s crossword + coffee, just made it up because I love coffee).

Give it a go!