Why another crossword?
The Italian crossword tradition is deep — Settimana Enigmistica, Domenica del Corriere, decades of elegant grid design. But the online experience had quietly migrated to the worst of the 2010s web: PDF downloads, pop-ups, subscribe-walls over half the page.
I wanted the opposite. A URL. A grid. A pencil.
The ritual
Three difficulties, rotating through the week. Hand-written Italian definitions with no forced language. No timer staring you down. No streak shaming you into opening the app at 11:47 PM. Verify letters when you want. Correct without penalty. Finish in five minutes or forty — the grid doesn't care.
You can play as a guest, forever. Registering just saves your times and keeps a quiet streak. Premium unlocks the archive — every puzzle ever published, organized by date and difficulty — at €4.99/month. That's the whole business.
The design
The brief was simple: make the grid feel like paper, not a CRUD form.
- Type
- Serif display across every heading. This is a puzzle, not a dashboard.
- Columns
- Numbered clue columns typeset like a printed magazine, not a bulleted list.
- Contrast
- Muted off-white canvas, deep black grid. High contrast where it matters; quiet everywhere else.
- Chrome
- None. The grid, the clues, the day's number. That's the entire interface.
The stack
- Nuxt
- One codebase, SSR by default, perfect SEO for an editorial product.
- TypeScript
- Cell state, cross-references, active direction, validation, autosave. Types earn their keep by the second week.
- PostgreSQL
- Each grid is a structured document. Queries by date, difficulty, and user completion state.
- Tailwind
- Used as a design-token layer — not a utility dump. Every class maps back to the typographic scale.
- Editorial pipeline
- I don't just render puzzles — I author them, verify them, and schedule them. The editorial tools matter as much as the player surface.
What I'm still learning
Building a product with a rhythm — one puzzle, once a day, forever — is different from building a feature.
There's no version 2 of Tuesday's grid. It was Tuesday, and then it was gone. Every day is a ship date. It's the best part.