The “Lud” Crossword

There’s this crossword puzzle online. It’s from the Ludington Daily News, a newspaper in Michigan. There are a lot of crossword puzzles online — the New York Newsday is a pretty good one, with a Saturday Stumper from hell.

The “Lud” is different. It breaks every crossword puzzle rule in the book. It never has a theme. And it mixes hard and easy clues in a way like no other crossword I’ve ever seen. Some of the somewhat easier ones include gems like:

1. Set again
2. Woody plant
3. Leg joint
4. Foot covering
5. Head covering

If you’re a crossword puzzle aficionado, you might kill yourself trying to come up with incredibly obscure answers. Rest assured, the writers of the “Lud” didn’t put themselves through a similar effort. Here are the answers to the clues above:

1. Reset
2. Tree
3. Knee
4. Shoe
5. Hat

Great, you think. A little kid’s crossword. You’d be wrong. That’s what makes the “Lud” so funny. There are also other, slightly more difficult clues thrown in the mix, like:

1. Take away by force
2. Sponsorship
3. Stable attendant
4. Wood sorrel
5. Faveolate

These are no longer so easy. Given a few letters, you’ll get some of them, but when you find “Woody plant” mixed in with “Wood sorrel”, you really have no idea whether you can just put in “Tree” for the first one. At first, you just don’t think it can be that easy. The answers to the stumpers above are:

1. Wrest
2. Aegis
3. Syce
4. Oca
5. Pitted

Somewhat of a mix of vocabulary levels in this puzzle, eh? The thing that makes you keep coming back is the scoring system. Half a point off for each wrong letter. One point off for each letter you ask it to solve for you. There is no mercy for mistyped letters. That’s what makes it even harder to put in the easy answers … you don’t want to lose points for taking the low road.

I’ve never gotten 100% on it. I think my best is 97%. Try it out for yourself and see how you do.