How to Create Hexagon Word Search Puzzles in Puzzle Maker Pro

Summary: Hexagon Word Search hides your word list in a honeycomb grid instead of a square one. This tutorial walks through the whole creation workflow — word list, board shape and size, shape masks, placement rules, filler letters, hidden messages, solution marking, styling and titles — and finishes with exporting and batching a full book’s worth.

Overview

You supply a list of words. Puzzle Maker Pro hides them along the three axes of a hexagon grid, fills the leftover cells, and gives you a puzzle page, a solution page and a printed word list — in any of the standard image and print formats.

Everything in this tutorial lives on six tabs: Words, Grid, Word Options, Solution, Style and Titles. You can generate a usable puzzle after the first two — there is a shortcut to the Generate step below once you have set them.

Required Modules

Hexagon Word Search
Lite makes the puzzle on the classic Hexagon board. Creative adds the Parallelogram and Grid board shapes, image shape masks, and full design control. Productivity adds Time Saver for batch creation. Creative Interactive and Productivity Interactive add online play — the JSON and HTML output that turns a puzzle set into a browser-playable game. See Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.

Not sure yet? Every module has a free demo. The demo watermarks its output and exports raster images only — no SVG and no PDF.

Preparation

Have your word list ready — typed out, in a .txt file, or a theme in mind for the AI assistant to build one from. Two things are worth deciding before you start:

How long are your words? The board sets a hard maximum, and words over it are rejected rather than squeezed in. On a hexagon board the limit is one less than double the board size (a size-5 board takes 9 letters; the largest, size 13, takes 25). On a Parallelogram or Grid board it is the larger of the row and column counts. The Words tab shows the current limit and updates it live as you change the board.
How many words? Count letters, not words: the words have to fit in the cells, and crossings only buy you a little back. A size-5 hexagon has 61 cells, so aim for roughly 50–60 letters in total — about 8–10 short-to-medium words. Push much past that and the placer starts dropping entries.

Start small — a size-5 hexagon with eight or so words — and grow once you like the look.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Add Your Words

On the Words tab, supply the list in whichever way suits you:

Type it straight into the list.
Load a file — one word per line.
Use the AI assistant — give it a theme and let it produce the list. It also writes a theme line (#title:) into the list, which the Titles tab can turn into the puzzle’s printed title automatically.

A line can carry a description as well as the word, in the form word:description — for example “OTTER:river mammal with webbed feet“. Descriptions are optional, and be aware that they always print: with Use hints off the word list shows OTTER : river mammal with webbed feet, and with it on the description alone. Add them when you want one of those two things, not as a note to yourself.

Words longer than the board’s limit are rejected, so if something is missing from the finished puzzle, check its length first. The printed word list is built from the words that were actually placed, so it never promises the solver a word that is not in the grid.

Choose the Board Shape and Size

On the Grid tab, pick the Layout. All three use the same hexagon cells and the same three axes; they differ only in the board’s outline.

Layout	Sized by	Looks like	Edition
Hexagon	Board size (side), 3–13	The classic honeycomb outline	Lite and up
Parallelogram	Rows × Cols, 5–40 each	A slanted rhombus	Creative and up
Grid	Rows × Cols, 5–40 each	An offset rectangle	Creative and up

The size controls change with the layout: Hexagon shows a single Board size (side) spinner, the other two show Rows and Cols. Board size is the number of cells along one edge, so a size-5 hexagon is 61 cells and a size-13 is 469.

Choose the shape for the page you are filling. A regular Hexagon suits a square-ish page; a wide Grid or Parallelogram suits a landscape layout or a two-puzzles-per-page spread.

You have enough for a puzzle already. With the words in and the board chosen, skip to Generate and Export and make one — then come back and work through the rest to control difficulty and appearance.

Confine the Board to a Shape (optional, Creative)

Still on the Grid tab, the Shape Mask (Creative) group confines the puzzle to a silhouette from any image you supply — a heart for a Valentine’s book, a tree for Christmas, an animal for a children’s title.

Pick the image and the board takes its shape; cells outside the silhouette simply do not exist. Two things to know:

The silhouette is fitted without stretching. An image shaped like the board fills it; a square image on an oblong board carves out a centred square. If you want the shape to fill a wide board, start from a wide image.
A mask is tied to the board it was built for. Change the layout or the size afterwards and the mask is dropped rather than misapplied — just pick the image again.

Masks work on all three layouts. Remember that a mask removes cells, so it also shrinks how much word list the board can hold.

Set the Placement Rules

On the Word Options tab, the Placement group decides how hard the puzzle is:

Backwards — off by default, so every word reads forward along its axis. Switch it on and words may also run in reverse, doubling the directions from three to six. This is the single biggest difficulty lever.
Allow overlap — controls whether two words on the same axis may share two or more cells (one word running through another along the same line). Crossings — two words sharing a single cell — are always allowed regardless of this setting, and are what make a grid feel densely packed.
Use hints — with this on, any word that has a description prints its description instead of the word in the word list, so the solver has to work out what they are looking for before they can look for it. A neat way to turn a word search into a light vocabulary quiz. Words with no description print as normal.
Algorithm — how the placer prioritises: Default, Compact (place all), No shared letters, or Use all words (longest first). Default is right for most puzzles; No shared letters produces an airier grid with no crossings; longest first helps when your list has a couple of words that only just fit.
Use all words / Max words — on by default. Clear it and set a cap if your list is longer than the board can hold and you want the puzzle maker to choose.

Choose the Filler Letters

Still on Word Options, the Letters group controls everything the solver sees that is not a word:

Filler letters — the pool the empty cells are drawn from, A–Z by default. Narrowing it changes the texture of the grid: fill with only the letters that appear in your words and the puzzle gets noticeably harder, because nothing stands out.
Word list case — how the printed list is cased: Unchanged, UPPERCASE or lowercase (the options are styled to show their effect). It does not change the grid, and it does not apply to description text when Use hints is on.
Hide letters — any letter you name here is left blank on the puzzle image while still appearing on the solution. Putting the vowels in gives you a grid full of holes: a distinctive, much harder variant. In a hidden-message puzzle only the word cells blank out — the message letters always stay visible, since they are the point.

The Word Options group above them holds three more controls:

Blacklist file — point this at a .txt file of words you never want to appear, and they are kept out of the whole finished grid, not just the word list. That includes words formed by accident in the filler letters, which is what makes it worth using for children’s books.
Hidden message words — covered next.
Hide word list — suppresses the printed list entirely, for a harder “no clues” variant. The grid and solution are unaffected; you simply do not get a word-list page.

Add a Hidden Message (optional)

Hidden message words turns the leftover cells into a second puzzle: instead of random filler, they spell out a message that the solver reads off the grid, left to right and row by row, once every word is found.

The box takes one message per line, and the generator uses the first one that fits — so give it two or three alternatives of different lengths rather than a single message it has to hit exactly.

Fitting is the hard part, because every cell that is not part of a word has to be part of the message. That makes the word list do most of the work:

The floor is ‘live cells’ minus message length. On the size-5 board suggested above (61 cells), a 10-letter message needs the words to cover 51 cells; on a 469-cell size-13 hexagon, a 20-character message needs them to cover 449.
That floor assumes a perfect pack with no crossings at all, and crossings stay switched on, so in practice supply about twice the floor in letters — roughly 100 letters of words for that size-5 example, 900 for the size-13 one — and include some short words. The search has to land on the free-cell budget precisely, and a list of only long words can only adjust the fit in big jumps.
The hint under the box states the requirement for the board in front of you, shape mask included. It cannot see your word list (that lives on the Words tab), so it tells you the bar, not whether you have cleared it — the generator settles that when you generate.
One trap: if you set Max words, only the longest words count toward the coverage — extra words cannot help and the short ones are excluded first. For hidden-message puzzles, leave Use all words on unless you have a reason not to.

If it cannot fit, you get a message saying so rather than a silently different puzzle.

Choose How Solutions Are Marked

On the Solution tab, decide how found words are shown on the solution page.

Marking — Capsule (a rounded ring around the word, the default), Line (a straight line through it), or None.
Capsule size % — 10–200. Lower values hug the letters more tightly, which helps on dense grids where capsules would otherwise collide.
Fill word cells — shades the cells of every found word, making the solution readable at a glance even at thumbnail size.
Bold solution — emphasises the answer letters against the filler. In a hidden-message puzzle this flips to emphasising the message letters, which is usually what you want there.

Style the Puzzle

The Style tab carries the canvas colour, the puzzle border, the cell fill and the font. Two Hexagon Word Search specifics:

The grid’s letter case lives in the font, not on the Letters tab. Open the font editor from the Style tab and set the case there, alongside family, size, weight and colour.
The puzzle border and cell fill are separate: the border is the outline around the whole board, the cell fill is the background inside each hexagon. A light cell fill with a heavy border reads well in print.

The general design workflow is shared across every module — see How to Customize Puzzle Designs in Puzzle Maker Pro.

Set the Title

On the Titles tab, choose a Smart Title. Hexagon Word Search offers:

Hex Word Search — e.g. “Hexagon Word Search”
Theme Hex Word Search — e.g. “Animals Hexagon Word Search”
Theme — e.g. “Animals” (the theme from your word list’s #title: line; falls back to the module name when the list has no theme)
Word Search Board Size — e.g. “Hexagon Word Search (Size 5)”, or “Hexagon Word Search (Size 8×12)” on a Parallelogram or Grid board
Theme Board Size — e.g. “Animals (Size 5)”
Custom — your own title text

The same options are available for the puzzle Description, which defaults to “Find the hidden words”. Smart titles always reach the puzzle book; tick Use branding on the Titles tab if you also want them printed on the loose puzzle image. For how the mechanism works, see How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro.

Generate and Export

Set Quantity at the top (1–999) and click Create. Each puzzle produces a puzzle page, a solution page and a word list — unless you ticked Hide word list, which drops the printed list.

In the output format panel, pick one raster format — JPG, PNG or transparent PNG — and tick SVG and PDF on top if you want them. Transparent PNG and SVG are the ones to reach for when you are dropping puzzles into a design of your own; PDF is the print-ready choice. All of them are available from Lite up; only the free demo is restricted, to watermarked raster.

With Creative Interactive or Productivity Interactive, you also get the JSON and HTML output that publishes a set as a browser-playable game.

Make a Whole Book

Two shared features do the heavy lifting once you are happy with a single puzzle:

Time Saver (Productivity) runs a grid of rows in one pass, and this module gives you real things to vary per row: board size ramping from 5 to 9 across the book so the puzzles get harder, a different shape mask per row for a seasonal collection, or Backwards switched on only for the last section. See How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver.
Puzzle Book Studio assembles the puzzles and their solutions into a finished, print-ready book with page numbers, a table of contents and your trim size. It is a separate product from this module. See Puzzle Book Studio Tutorials.

One habit worth forming: save a preset once the style is right, then vary only the word list per book. Creator presets are stored under the module’s own name. Time Saver keeps its own shared preset folder rather than a per-module one — your batch grid can mix puzzle types — so save a Time Saver preset separately once the rows are set up.

Outcome

You can now build a Hexagon Word Search end to end: choose the board shape and size for your page, confine it to a silhouette, add words (with descriptions if you want clue-style play), set the difficulty with backwards words and filler letters, add a hidden message, control how the solution is marked, style it, title it from the word list’s own theme, and export or batch it into a book.

FAQ

Which edition do I need, and can I sell what I make?
Lite makes Hexagon-board puzzles; Creative adds the other two board shapes, shape masks and full design control; Productivity adds Time Saver batch creation; the Interactive editions add online play. On rights: Creative and up lets you sell the finished puzzles to readers and customers (KDP, Etsy, Teachers Pay Teachers), and Productivity adds selling or supplying to other publishers.

What is the largest puzzle I can make?
A hexagon board goes up to size 13 — 469 cells, with a longest line of 25 letters. Parallelogram and Grid boards go up to 40 × 40.

Why was one of my words left out?
Almost always because it is longer than the board allows: one less than double the board size on a hexagon, or the larger of rows and columns on the other two layouts. The Words tab shows the current limit. The other possibilities are a Max words cap, or simply too many letters for the cells available.

Can I stop rude or unwanted words appearing by accident?
Yes. Point the blacklist at a .txt file and those words are kept out of the entire finished grid, including any formed by chance in the filler letters.

How do I make the puzzle harder without making it bigger?
Switch on Backwards, narrow the Filler letters to the letters already in your words, and consider Hide letters to blank the vowels on the puzzle image. Hide word list removes the clues entirely. Each works on its own; together they are a serious challenge.

Can I export puzzles for a website?
Yes — SVG and transparent PNG for design work, and with an Interactive edition, JSON and HTML output for online play.