When I was visiting Ecuador a few years back, there was a type of crossword in the paper that I’d never seen before. Each clue was in one of the squares on grid with directional arrows indicating where to fill in the answer (arrows pointing left and up meant that the answer was filled in backwards). Is there any name for this type of crossword? Is it popular anywhere else?
They sound similar to the “Pencil Pointers” puzzles that regularly appear in GAMES magazine and Games World of Puzzles.
A little googling suggests there’s something similar in Britain, called “Arrow Words.”
It is the European style, used in a variety of languages and cultures there. They are generally called “crosswords” (or whatever the translation of that term is). As Thudlow notes, both Games and World of Puzzles run them occasionally (they had an all-Pencil-Pointer magazine for a while, you may be able to get a back issue of that). I believe Dell runs them occasionally as well, perhaps in their variety titles.
Makes them a little difficult to search for online… whose idea was that anyway? :dubious:
Thanks for the info!
Is this the European style because the limited number of word endings (too many o’s and a’s in Spanish) make English or American styles too difficult to set? I could see how running words up might be very useful so as not to find too many words with long strings of vowels inside.
The Games Pencil Pointers are one or two stars at most. Are there hard ones in other magazines?
And apropo of nothing the Spanish word for crossword puzzle is ‘crucigrama’. For some reason I really like saying ‘crucigrama’, very satisfying.
It’s hard to make them much more difficult just because of the format – they generally have fewer squares, plus the clues have to be incredibly short.
I remember the first issue of Games Magazine to feature Pencil Pointers. The introduction to the puzzle specifically mentioned they were borrowing the style from another country. I couldn’t find anything about it googling, but I was under the impression they claimed the style was European.
I never gave it any thought, but Pencil Pointers do frequently break the rule where every letter square is shared by two clues. Often the first or last letter of the answer will be isolated by itself. Perhaps this is why.
In Spain that structure is called “autodefinidos,” lit. self-defined. My mother loves them, she finds them easier to navigate than regular crosswords (you don’t need to track the definition and the location).
Yes, I actually think I have a Spanish crossword book floating around somewhere. I should get my daughter to pick up a German one for me before she comes back from college. No multi-word answers needed in German. 
The “rule” that every square must be used in both an across and a down word is for the American-style traditional crossword only. British-style crosswords (which are called cryptic crosswords here in the U.S.) have what are called “unkeyed letters” (letters that don’t appear in more than one word).
The use of unkeyed letters in Pencil Pointers generally because the constructor needs a box for a clue; the starting letter in an entry may be in a place where there is otherwise no adjacent box.