PuzzleTide CLI — word search, crossword & sudoku generator

License: MIT

Word search generator, crossword generator, and sudoku generator + solver inone local-first puzzle generator CLI — with printable PDF worksheets, starterword banks, verifiable LLM evals, and bundled agent skills. From the makersof puzzletide.com.

Install

npm install -g puzzletide
ptide --version

The package installs both binaries:

ptide
puzzletide

Why generate puzzles with a CLI

Ask a language model to write a word search and you get a grid where half thewords are broken; ask it for a sudoku and you usually get one with severalsolutions, or none. Grids are exactly the kind of output LLMs are bad at anddeterministic code is good at.

PuzzleTide CLI is that deterministic code:

Every word search word is placed and verifiable — placement coordinates arepart of the output, and the generators are property-tested.
Every generated sudoku is checked to have exactly one solution.
Every crossword is validated against its own clues before it's returned.
Same --seed in, same puzzle out, on any machine.

The package also ships SKILL.md agent skills, so coding agents (Pi, Hermes,OpenClaw, and other SKILL.md-based systems) reach for the CLI instead ofhand-writing grids.

Command model

ptide <namespace> <operation> [input] [options]   # for humans
ptide run <tool-id> [input] [options] --json      # canonical, for scripts/agents
ptide tools list | search <q> | info <id> | docs <id>
ptide agent manifest

Use short commands interactively and canonical tool ids in automation:

ptide sudoku generate --difficulty hard
ptide run puzzle.sudoku.generate --difficulty hard --json

Word search generator

Eight placement directions with easy/medium/hard presets, auto-sized grids(6–30), accent/space/hyphen normalization. Words come from flags, files, orbundled themes:

# Word search from your own words, printed in the terminal
ptide wordsearch generate --words "coral,shark,kelp,wave,tide"

# Themed printable word search (puzzle page + solution page)
ptide wordsearch generate --theme animals/ocean-animals --pdf ocean.pdf

# Kids mode: easy = forward-only words
ptide wordsearch generate --theme seasonal/halloween --difficulty easy

Crossword generator

Interlocking placement with standard crossword numbering, clue-gridvalidation, and deterministic fallback clues for theme words. Words thatcannot interlock are reported instead of silently dropped:

# Crossword with your clues
ptide crossword generate --words "PARIS: Capital of France; TOKYO: Capital of Japan"

# From a JSON file, as a printable PDF
ptide crossword generate --file words.json --pdf review.pdf --title "Unit 4 Review"

Sudoku generator and solver

Easy, medium, hard, and expert sudoku (17–21 givens) with a uniquenessguarantee, an instant solver, and a validator that reports conflicts,solvability, and solution uniqueness:

ptide sudoku generate --difficulty expert --seed 42
ptide sudoku solve "53..7....6..195....98....6.8...6...34..8.3..17...2...6.6....28....419..5....8..79"
ptide sudoku validate --file puzzle.txt
ptide daily        # today's daily sudoku, same for everyone on a given UTC day

Printable puzzles: PDF worksheets and SVG

Every generator takes --pdf <file> for a print-ready worksheet — puzzlepage(s) plus a solution page (--paper letter|a4, omit the answer key with--no-solution-page) — and --svg <file> for vector images. Printable wordsearch and printable sudoku sheets for a classroom packet are one loop away:

for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do
  ptide sudoku generate --difficulty medium --seed "$i" --pdf "sudoku-$i.pdf" --title "Sudoku #$i"
done

Prefer ready-made sheets? Themystery and murder printable word searchis a reader favorite, with hundreds more atprintable puzzles.

Word banks and word tools

30 starter themes (ocean animals, fruits, space, halloween, ...) — browse,search, pattern-match, anagrams, random picks. Bring your own lists via--words/--file, or play the full curated collection atpuzzletide.com:

ptide words themes --search dinosaur
ptide words match "c_r_l"        # crossword-style pattern matching
ptide words anagram coral

There's a hangman game in the terminal too: ptide play hangman.

Agent skills

Pi can load the bundled skills directly from this npm package:

pi install npm:puzzletide

The package manifest declares:

{
  "pi": {
    "skills": ["./skills"]
  }
}

Five skills are included: word search, crossword, sudoku, printable puzzles,and agent evals. Each prefers the local CLI and checks ptide, puzzletide,then npx puzzletide. Skills never auto-install anything; agents should askthe user before installing.

MCP server for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any MCP client

The companion package puzzletide-mcpexposes every non-interactive tool over the Model Context Protocol — the sameword search generator, crossword generator, sudoku generator/solver, wordtools, and evals, callable from Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, or any MCPclient:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "puzzletide": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "puzzletide-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

See docs/mcp.md for tool names, arguments, and per-clientsetup.

Tools

The MCP server (and ptide run <tool-id>) exposes 15 tools:

puzzle_wordsearch_generate: Generate a word search grid from custom words, files, or themed word banks — every placement verifiable, printable via PDF/SVG.
puzzle_crossword_generate: Generate an interlocking crossword with standard numbering and validated clues.
puzzle_sudoku_generate: Generate easy, medium, hard, or expert sudoku with a guaranteed unique solution.
puzzle_sudoku_solve: Solve a sudoku from its 81-character string and report whether the solution is unique.
puzzle_sudoku_validate: Validate a sudoku grid — conflicts, solvability, and solution uniqueness.
words_categories: List word bank categories.
words_themes: List or search the bundled themed word lists.
words_list: List the words in a theme, filtered by length or count.
words_match: Find words matching a crossword-style pattern (c_r_l).
words_anagram: Find anagrams of the given letters in the word bank.
words_random: Pick a random word, optionally from one theme.
words_stats: Word bank statistics.
eval_generate: Generate reproducible, objectively gradable puzzle tasks for benchmarking LLMs and agents.
eval_check: Grade answers to generated eval tasks by construction — no answer key trusted.
play_daily: Print today's daily sudoku (same for everyone on a UTC day).

Verifiable LLM evals

Puzzle answers are checkable without an answer key: a sudoku answer eithersatisfies the rules and preserves the givens or it doesn't; a word searchanswer either spells the word along a straight line in the grid or itdoesn't. That makes puzzles clean benchmark tasks for LLM evals — no LLMjudge needed:

ptide eval generate --type sudoku --n 20 --difficulty hard --seed 1 --out tasks.json
# ...run your model on tasks.json, collect [{id, answer}] ...
ptide eval check --tasks tasks.json --answers answers.json --json

The (type, difficulty, n, seed) tuple fully determines the task set, so itnames a reproducible benchmark.

Library usage

The engines are importable TypeScript with no CLI involved:

import { generateSudoku, generateWordSearch, wordSearchPdf } from 'puzzletide';

const sudoku = generateSudoku({ difficulty: 'hard', seed: 42 });
const search = generateWordSearch({
  words: ['coral', 'shark', 'kelp'],
  directions: ['E', 'S', 'SE'],
  seed: 7,
});
const pdfBytes = await wordSearchPdf(search, { title: 'Ocean Animals' });

More docs:

CLI commands
Tool registry
Agent skills

Online versions

Prefer a browser?

Privacy

Everything runs locally. No account, no API key, no telemetry, no networkaccess.

Development

npm install
npm run build     # tsc → dist/
npm test          # vitest + fast-check property tests (build first: CLI tests run dist/)

The starter word banks are generic, original lists written for this package(scripts/wordbanks-source.json, compiled with npm run build:wordbanks).Theme contributions are welcome — add an entry to the source file and run thebuild. The full curated PuzzleTide word bank collection is proprietary topuzzletide.com and is not part of this repository.

Citing PuzzleTide CLI

If you use PuzzleTide CLI in your work — for example the verifiable puzzleevals in a model benchmark — please cite it (or use GitHub's "Cite thisrepository" button):

@software{puzzletide_cli,
  author  = {{Caravaca Labs}},
  title   = {PuzzleTide CLI: word search, crossword \& sudoku generator with verifiable LLM evals},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/Caravaca-Labs/puzzletide-cli},
  note    = {From the makers of \url{https://puzzletide.com}}
}

Plain text: "PuzzleTide CLI (Caravaca Labs, 2026),https://github.com/Caravaca-Labs/puzzletide-cli — from the makers ofhttps://puzzletide.com."

PuzzleTide CLI — word search, crossword & sudoku generator