Cryptick – free and open-source alternative to Minute Cryptic
Hi HN! I'm an amateur cryptic crossword solver and setter, who cut my teeth on Minute Cryptic. I liked that you could create custom clues on MC but was annoyed that it required creating an account to do. I wanted to create a free, open-source, and (as much as possible) anonymous version to make it easy to share clues online; not everything needs a user account to provide a good service to users. I'm primarily a backend developer so this was also a learning experience in creating a site with no backend; it's all vanilla client-side HTML / CSS / JS, built using Metalsmith.js, hosted…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! I'm an amateur cryptic crossword solver and setter, who cut my teeth on Minute Cryptic. I liked that you could create custom clues on MC but was annoyed that it required creating an account to do. I wanted to create a free, open-source, and (as much as possible) anonymous version to make it easy to share clues online; not everything needs a user account to provide a good service to users. I'm primarily a backend developer so this was also a learning experience in creating a site with no backend; it's all vanilla client-side HTML / CSS / JS, built using Metalsmith.js, hosted as a static site on AWS S3 behind CloudFront. The source is on GitHub, of course! https://github.com/mrwilson/cryptick I'm still iterating heavily based on feedback, which would be appreciated! I, plus a few guest setters, also run a Clue of the Day entry on Cryptick which is exposed as an RSS feed (https://cryptick.wildvale.co.uk/feed.xml). Here's today's (thematically appropriate) COTD: Film franchise launch snubbed, original footage sent back with extra section (4,4) (https://cryptick.wildvale.co.uk/cotd/2026-05-04.html)
Does the same job
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