Crypto-Crossword

My interests in crosswords is somewhat recent, compared to my general love of puzzles. When I was a kid, I got a subscription to Games Magazine and even though I loved the puzzles, I would pretty much entirely avoid the crosswords. Logic puzzles? Check. General word puzzles? Check. I liked those, because they involved less of having to know bits of trivia, and more on being able to see a pattern. And my favorite puzzles were cryptograms, those puzzles where you have a passage or a list, except each letter of the alphabet has been substituted with a different letter. If you'd like a literary example check out one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories: The Adventure of the Dancing Men.

So it's really no surprise that my first attempts at crosswords were with "Coded Crosswords", crosswords that didn't have any clues, but where each little white square had a random number between one and twenty-six, and each number corresponded with a letter of the alphabet. They're basically cryptograms crosswords. And I love them. They're still among my favorite puzzles to solve, though, if you're pretty good at cryptograms like I am, they can be a bit too easy.

Anyway, here's a small little cryptogram crossword that I whipped up. I've given you two letters to start out with. Have fun! I'll post the solution sometime soon...ish!