Crossword Express (formerly MagnumOpus)

Crosswords and similar puzzles have always enjoyed a decent amount of popularity, because they are both fun and informative at the same time. Whether you find them in a newspaper or a dedicated magazine, coming up with answers to intricate riddles is a challenge helps many people relax. However, if you ever wondered how are these made, you can easily find out for yourself.

Crossword Express is a useful application for those who want to create their own crosswords to share with other people, as well as for those who want to play by themselves and never run out of material. As such, the tool is both a game and a generator, which should easily please everyone and serve as quite the source of entertainment for many puzzle-lovers out there.

To begin with, you are greeted by a window that allows you to pick the type of puzzle you intend on playing/creating. As such, you have the option to choose between anything from freeform crosswords, to domino, letter drop, and even Sudoku. Each one of these comes with an editor in which you are free to let your imagination run wild, generate the entire thing using the inbuilt algorithms, or just play along to pass the time.

In case you want to get serious about it and you need a lot of material on a regular basis, some advanced functions are available as well. Hence, if you do not want to use the already existing dictionaries when you generate the crosswords, you can add your own, or even create one from scratch. The same is true for grids and templates, which should save you a lot of time when dealing with massive numbers of puzzles.

There are even some word tools to help you come up with synonyms or anagrams, as well as container words. In essence, the application contains almost everything you might need in order to produce as many puzzles as you wish. Not only that, but the user interface is quite straightforward and simple to utilize, even without too much experience when it comes to computers.

All things considered, Crossword Express is quite the useful application, with a plethora of features to help you generate all sorts of puzzles and crosswords. As a bonus, the entire thing is written in Java, which means that it basically runs on almost every platform out there.

Note: If you are experiencing difficulties trying to install this program, please refer to the author's website for detailed instructions.