Hi, we are Maggie and Dan, and we make the puzzles on this site.
We are paper puzzle people. The kind who keep a pencil in the glove box, finish the word search on the children’s menu before the food arrives, and will happily argue about whether a word running diagonally and backwards is fair. (It is.)
The Puzzle Brain started because we kept printing puzzles for other people. A stack of word searches for a long car ride. A maze to buy ten quiet minutes in a restaurant. A puzzle with big, clear letters for a relative in a care home, who loved a word search but could no longer read the tiny ones in the paper. Most of what we found online was cluttered, awkward to print, or buried under pop-ups, so we started making our own.
How we make them
We pick every theme and every word list ourselves, and check the spelling and the facts. A small program we built lays out the grids and the mazes. It makes sure every word appears exactly once, so nobody finds a second PUMPKIN hiding in a corner, and that every maze has exactly one way through.
The brain teasers are different. We write the case files by hand and test them on each other, and we dig the classic puzzles out of old puzzle books, keep the original words and work through every answer step by step.
Every puzzle is marked with how hard it is, so you know what you are printing before you print it. Easy grids keep the words reading forwards. Hard ones hide them in every direction, among letters chosen to trip you up.
Who they are for
Anyone who likes a puzzle on paper. Parents keeping kids busy on a rainy afternoon, teachers who need something for the last ten minutes of a lesson, and activity coordinators running a session for a group. The large print puzzles are for anyone who, like our relative, wants letters they can actually see, and the kids puzzles start small.
Print them, copy them
Every puzzle is free to print and photocopy for home, classroom, library and care home use. The answers print separately, so the puzzle sheet can go straight to the person solving it. The terms cover the one thing we ask, which is not to sell them.
Say hello
If you spot a mistake, want a theme we have not done yet, or just finished a hard one and want to tell someone, email us at hello@thepuzzlebrain.com. We read everything.
Maggie and Dan