1,000,000 Crosswords

1,000,000 Crosswords has been produced as a way for foreign language students to learn English, It was probably intended to aid Italian speakers primarily because it plays in both English and Italian, i.e. the game instructions can be viewed in Italian but all the games are in English.

The heart of the game is a crossword generator which takes its words from one or a mixture of these six categories Adjectives, Idioms and Collocations, Nouns, Phrasal Verbs. In addition the crosswords have six difficulty settings and five different sizes ranging from 10X10 to 30x30. Puzzles can be printed as blank puzzles for a student, part completed to be continued later or as a teacher copy with all the answers filled in.

When playing a crossword not all the clues are visible at the same time, the player can either click on the word in the grid to see the clue and fill it in or they can click on a clue and the cursor will be taken to that word. Unusually if the player enters an incorrect word the game allows the typing to proceed and only enters the correct letters; for example if the answer was GREEN and the player entered CREAM the ‘R’ and the ‘E’ would be the right letters in the right place and would remain on screen.

In addition to the crossword puzzles there are also three varieties of word search puzzle which also have six difficulty settings and can also be printed:* The standard wordsearch where the player has to find all the words supplied in a list

• A Puzzle wordsearch where, instead of a list of words, the player is given a series of clues – one per word to be found

• An Anagram wordsearch where the words in the list provided are all jumbled up, the words within the grid are still in standard English though.