Show HN: Build your own Bracket City puzzle
6 comments
·October 31, 2025jaspday
I started playing Bracket City after it was featured on HN, and when I learned about the build-your-own feature (through playing the game, as it happened) I built one and shared it with my family. It was a lot of fun! Honestly, I've wanted to make my own puzzles ever since I first played. Actually doing it was like rubbing catnip on the part of my brain that likes picking words apart and putting them back together. Thank you for releasing this!
knuckleheads
Very nice! I had been wondering you constructed these. I've enjoyed playing them! A question I would have is how meta do you think can you get with these hints? In crosswords, you often see a lot of references to other clues in the crossword. And so I wonder, with bracket city puzzles, it seems like it would be hard to dip into that self reference, as the tree structure of the clues makes it hard to reference other clues and there's no labels like 2 across you could use.
brgross
I've played around a little with this but never found a way to do it that I thought worked for the Atlantic puzzle.
Here's a very bad example I just made of one way you might use emoji to make inter-clue references:
https://suburbs.bracket.city/5Q1O24
too confusing/unsatisfying right now -- but I made the builder partly so that people would experiment...I bet someone will figure out something good!
knuckleheads
Yeah I can’t say the emoji linkage do it for me. Perhaps, though, what about color highlights? Sven’s Sudoku Pad lets you apply colors to cells and this is used to great effect during solves on cracking the cryptic. Flipping that from solving to authoring, if you wouldn’t mind adding the option to allow highlighting of clues from some simple preset color list, that might be able to give people some options.
knuckleheads
Ah, in fact, could you add three options: 1. Turn off the display of brackets. 2. Pick colors for each clue. 3. Allow the puzzle to be displayed with a preset fixed width.
fakedang
I just want to let you know that I play Bracket City every day. First thing in the morning after waking up and showering is playing Bracket City. :)
Granted, I've been having quite a shit streak of late.
Hi HN — Bracket City is the word puzzle game I made earlier this year and (in part thanks to this community, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622719) managed to license to the Atlantic in April.
The game has been growing a lot and I wanted to share the latest: a tool that lets anyone make a Bracket City puzzle — specifically a “Bracket Suburb”!
I made this tool to help me construct puzzles, and I’ve been using it every day for months.
After the Atlantic launch, I started to get the occasional inquiry about whether there was a way to make your own puzzle. One guy wanted to make a Bracket City puzzle part of a puzzle hunt he made to propose to his girlfriend (he did it!), and that convinced me it would be fun to make something publicly available.
I got the Atlantic on board with the idea, and we are launching it today with an "example" custom puzzle: a Halloween/horror-themed puzzle by my pal Wyna Liu of NYT Connections fame.
https://suburbs.bracket.city/wyna
And we've got few other fun "celeb" puzzles lined up for later this year.
The thought is that folks can use the builder to make custom puzzles for birthday wishes/event invites/insults/proposals/break ups in addition to “normal” Bracket City puzzles.
I'm also hoping to learn more about the potential of the format – crossword puzzles have benefited so much from the creativity of constructors – I'm hoping bracket puzzles do the same.
The good news is that it’s way easier to construct a bracket puzzle than a crossword. Once you try it, you’ll see why: you have many more degrees of freedom. In a crossword, each added word increases the level of constraint exponentially — every new entry sharply reduces the remaining options for completing the grid. Bracket puzzles are the opposite: as you add clues, you expand the available fodder for new ones.
Anyway, I would love any/all feedback and to try puzzles created by folks here. I’m hoping we will figure out a way to highlight the best community puzzles on the Atlantic soon!
PS and please keep playing the main game / sending me feedback / denouncing me on the subreddit