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Steer the app design
Want to play in a dedicated Piñones app? Help us decide what features to build first, such as competitions and puzzles suited to your own personal interests!
Show off your stats
Want to save your scores, see your solving stats, browse your Wordle nemesis's stats, accumulate badges, and climb those leaderboards? Sign up below for updates!
Play before they're cool
You know what? Bow ties Piñones are cool, but everyone else doesn't know that yet. The bragging rights of first discovery in your friend group are up for grabs...
A brand new word puzzle
Piñones combine crosswords with anagrams. Solving the grid is only half the fun, as each letter in a Piñones grid is a part of a word or phrase that you must unscramble to truly finish a Piñone. Oh, and sometimes the words in the grid are backwards, but you'll get the gnah of it! We esimorp!
Read the clues
Clues are your classic crossword-style clues.
(Cryptic clues coming in the future!)
Solve the grid
Complete the grid with the answers to the clues.
Remember that some words will be backwards!
Solve the anagram
Certain letters are given to you in the phrase.
Scramble the rest of them to solve the anagram!
Celebrate yourself
These puzzles can be seriously challenging.
Remind yourself how clever you are!
Get updates for Piñones
Receive email notifications for new puzzles and be the first to know when we release our app in beta. Do terms like "leaderboard", "badges", or "competitions" raise an eyebrow? Then let's sign you up.
Actual things people have typed to us
My sister is very into crosswords, I sent it to her and she goes "wait i love this"
When I realized the grid and fill-in section used the same letters, my mind was blown
Wait, how much am I getting paid for this testimonial again?
Answers to questions we think you might have
A Piñone is a word puzzle that has two parts: a grid and an anagram. If you solve a regular crossword, then after you solve the grid, the puzzle is over. In a Piñone, finishing the grid is only halfway. You must then take each letter in the grid and rearrange it into fill-in-the-blank spaces to solve the final word or phrase. A Piñone is complete only when both the grid and anagram are solved.
To think of it another way, to create a Piñone, you start with a word or phrase and try to fit the letters into a grid such that all the columns and rows are words, and then write clues for those words in the grid. You're just now working backwards to determine that word or phrase!
There will always be free Piñones. Of course, in order to continue developing the game and handling server costs, there will be monetization options. We have many ideas for premium features, but ultimately the community will help us decide what is and isn't worth a few dollars thrown our way to keep making Piñones an enjoyable pastime.
Right now, the new puzzle links are sent through email. This will change in the future, but we're starting scrappy and hope you can forgive us for that!
How absolutely kind of you to ask. All the usual ways, really! Tell a friend, start a friendly competition in your friend group, share on your socials, and subscribe to the email list. All of those are genuinely really big.
We will be exploring a Patreon page in the near future though, so if you find yourself in a position to be able to contribute financially, that is truly wonderful and will speed up our development, and provide you with extra bonus treats as well!
Currently, no. While we believe a highly tuned AI model could in theory create them, we're putting our efforts into the core functionality of the game and app first. However, we do envision a future where others can easily create Piñones within our platform, and AI could help there!
The creator of Piñones grew up in a household where both their parents were English teachers, and so had a love of language, and thus language games, instilled early on. This naturally progressed into crosswords, and then cryptic crosswords. There was a legendary cryptic crossword clue setter named Rev. John Galbraith Graham who passed in 2013 who often wrote puzzles under the pseudonym, Araucaria. Araucaria trees are also known as "monkey puzzle" trees, and the seeds of the araucaria tree are called piñones. As a nod to the famous setter and the fact that Piñones are miniature crosswords, naming them after the seeds of the tree felt perfectly apt.
This is the plan! Our progression plan, currently, is: Open alpha web app > Patreon release > Closed beta release > Referral beta release > Full release > Will Shortz does a Piñone during an interview > A Piñone is carved on NASA's Pioneer 12.
"Pin-yo-nays"! In Spanish, the "Ñ" is called an "eñe", and you effectively add a "yah" or "yuh" sound after the "en" sound.
To date, we have heard the following attempts to say our name:
Pin-owns
Pin-ones
Pin-o-nays
Pin-yowns
We don't expect these pronunciations will stop any time soon, but at least now you know!
A message from the creator
"Hi, Kirran here, creator of Piñones. These puzzles have been a long time in the making. Born out of a love for 3x3 blocks created through intersecting Scrabble words, developed in the margins of high school workbooks, and refined through friends and niche communities, Piñones are what they are today through an absolute love of the written language, alongside a healthy penchant for wordplay and obfuscation. My favourite reaction to someone solving a Piñone is "I'm really mad at you right now. Where's the next one?". The best Piñones provide the apparent challenge of a molehill, but result in the pleasure of summiting a mountain (or perhaps a ben or tor). Of course that is different for each person, but I hope I manage that for you every now and again."
Contact the team
Ask us your seldom-asked questions that didn't make the FAQ, send us your feedback, or otherwise compel us to read pixels you forge with your fingertips.
The future of Piñones
Personalized dictionaries
You have a lot of niche knowledge, that would be unfair to put in puzzles for a general audience, but would be a lot of fun for you. You did memorize all the airport codes right?
Themed puzzle packs
Alongside personalized dictionaries, we're exploring themed puzzles packs to dive in deep on knowledge areas that are interesting and exciting to you.
Build your own?
We envision helping people build their own Piñones in the future using our own tooling and sharing them with their friends, and the rest of the world!
More than just clues and answers. Every solved Piñones crossword reveals letters for a final, hidden phrase. It's a crossword, an anagram, and a riddle, all in one.
We are once again asking you to subscribe to our puzzles.
© 2025 Piñones - in association with Polar Labs. All rights reserved.
