Quality is a slapdash measure of how I felt about the puzzle when I added it to this page:
🎖️ — This is so good I can't believe I created it. Surely I will never reach these heights again. Please try this.
🥇 — Solid work that I'm very happy with. It's worth your time.
🥈 — Perfectly serviceable, but nothing special about it. I won't fault you for skipping it.
🥉 — This is hot garbage and I'm only listing it for completion. If you try it, I am sorry.
Difficulty is a similarly slapdash measure of how hard I thought the puzzle was when I added it to this page. Unlike quality, however, you may squabble with me about difficulty.
0 — Trivial. This very nearly solves itself. I literally don't know how to make something easier.
1 — Easy. It might take a little while, but even someone with no experience in the genre should be able to get through this. A Monday NYT puzzle or a Generally Approachable Sudoku.
2 — Moderate. Probably needs some unspoken rules, but I'd still consider this a straightforward puzzle. A Tuesday NYT puzzle.
3 — Tricky. A little lateral thinking may be required. A Sunday NYT puzzle.
4 — Hard. Requires a clever and/or tedious leap, or two. A tough Baba Is You level.
5 — Fiendish. A two-hour Cracking the Cryptic video.
X — Nightmareish. This is downright unfair (in at least one place, even if the rest is easy), and unfortunately, not in a fun way. I have made an error.
For some puzzles, I've left commentary on what I think about it that should only be read after solving the puzzle, since it necessarily spoils the whole thing. Be warned!
sudoku
Unless otherwise noted, these use standard variant rules. If you play via SudokuPad, the applicable rules are spelled out within the puzzle. All you really need to know is the basic rule of a sudoku: fill the grid with the digits 1 to 9, such that each digit appears exactly once in each row, column, and box (a bold 3×3 region).
"Solution" links go to Sudoku Maker, which both gives the solution and also lets you edit the puzzle if you like.
While writing up my page on variant sudoku rules, I discovered there was no "genuinely approachable" yin-yang sudoku, and in fact I'd never heard of such a thing.
So I did my best to concoct one. It does still require knowing the basic implicit rules of yin-yang, which I can't readily tutorialize within a single puzzle, but I tried to leave ample... opportunities... to discover them.
Responses were a mix of "never done one of these before but I got it, that's cool" and "never done one of these before and I'm completely fucking stuck", which is about what I expected.
Spoiler commentary
In the process of constructing this puzzle, I learned a new implicit rule of yin-yang, due to accidentally making the whole puzzle impossible from the very start.
The given 1 in the bottom row used to be one cell over, in place of the 4 that's there now. That made it impossible to fill the grid with any valid yin-yang coloring.
The reason is, as I suspected and perhaps you do too, parity. A full explanation of the principle is on the Puzzling Stack Exchange — a sudoku grid is 9×9, so it has an 8×8 grid of inner vertices, so it has equal numbers of black and white vertices, so the boundary must enter and exist on different colors.
Killer, very easy. The previous puzzle drew a comment from someone who had never done an "empty" sudoku before, so I threw together the easiest killer I could manage.
Killer + little killer, moderate. Putting this page together made me wonder why I've never made a sudoku, so I dropped what I was doing to make a sudoku. A compelling theme for my first attempt!
crosswords
All of these are theme puzzles. I just don't know why you'd make a crossword without a theme.
Links go to my crosswords on squares.io, which I like because it allows collaborative solving — you can just pass around the URL to your solve (it should have a /s/ in it) and have friends chime in.
You can also download the puzzles and play them in whatever crossword gizmo you like. (I do not know anything about crossword gizmos and cannot help you with this.) Most of them are in Crossword Compiler's XML format; a couple are in the ancient PUZ format. Probably right click and Save As so you don't accidentally see the solution.
Puzzles all made with QXW, mostly because it's the only open source Linux puzzle constructor I could find, but it's plenty solid.
This "canonical" version has some sassier clues, to the point that I felt compelled to also make an easier version — on squares.io, or download as CCXML.
Tried to make a quicker, easier puzzle with less tech jargon in it. In fact I made it so quickly I didn't even notice it wasn't square until I was done. It's quicker; not sure about easier.
My first crack at crossword construction. It's not great. A couple answers are, um, dubious (wow, filling a grid is hard!), many other answers are too clever for their own good and not clued very well, and half the grid is computers stuff.
Also the puzzle doesn't come with the solution for some reason? I think QXW maybe just doesn't export the solution in PUZes. Here's the solution if you need it.
But what really puts this over the top into X territory is... drumroll please... the answer to 47-Down is misspelled. Chef kiss.
