EV Crosswords

Daily puzzles are one of the clearest reader-retention plays in publishing right now — but until now, that’s mostly been available to newsrooms large enough to build or license it themselves. EV Crosswords brings the same mechanic to any WordPress site: self-serve, no enterprise contract, no sales call.

Generate word lists in seconds, from a prompt or from your own articles The admin interface uses AI to generate lists of words and hints for your puzzles — either from a manual prompt, or straight from the content of one of your existing posts. This is the fastest way to turn an article you’ve already written into a puzzle readers can play.

Or skip AI entirely Every AI feature is optional. Build a crossword manually by typing your word list or adding words one by one. Word search puzzles auto-generate from your word list (configurable grid size, optional diagonal/reversed words) and can be regenerated as many times as you like before saving.

Native to the block editor Puzzles embed as real Gutenberg blocks — no shortcodes, no iframes.

See what readers actually finish Built-in plays and completions tracking, right inside wp-admin, so you can see which puzzles are working without a separate analytics tool.

Bring your own AI provider Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or a self-hosted Ollama instance — your key, your data, your choice.

Free vs. Pro

EV Crosswords is free and fully functional today — unlimited puzzles, AI or manual word list creation, native blocks, and usage tracking, all included, no account required.

A Pro tier is in development for publishers who want to run daily puzzles as a serious retention strategy: scheduled/automated puzzle publishing, reader streaks and leaderboards, deeper retention analytics, and multi-site licensing for agencies. Pro isn’t available for purchase yet — see https://entreveloper.com/pricing/ for the current status.

Development

Development happens in Github: EV-Crosswords