Summary: Honeycomb builds hexagonal crossword pages where every clue is a six-letter word read around a numbered hex. This walkthrough takes you from a blank Creator to an exported page: choosing the shape, hiding your own phrase inside the board, deciding where the clues print, editing the clue text before anything is rendered, and running a batch.
If you already make Word Search or Hexagon Word Search books, Honeycomb is the crossword-style hex: every clue is one six-letter word, and neighbouring hexes share letters, so the page checks itself as the solver fills it. It is also one of the quicker modules to get a good page out of, because there is only one answer length to think about.
Overview
You will pick a shape and size, set the difficulty and reading direction, choose how many puzzles to make, optionally hide a phrase of your own inside each board, choose whether the clue list prints on the image or in your book, review the clue text, style the board, title it, and export. New to the puzzle itself? How Honeycomb Puzzles Work covers the rules first.
Required Modules
Honeycomb [/product/honeycomb-puzzle-maker/ - confirm] — the module itself. A free demo covers every current module, so you can try the puzzle and the settings before buying — the demo makes one watermarked puzzle at a time, so the batch run and the print formats are what the paid editions add.
Creative is where Honeycomb starts. It makes the puzzle, gives you full design control over the board, and brings the two things that are specific to this module — the hidden phrase and the pre-print clue review — alongside the platform features you would expect: the static exports (JPG, PNG, transparent PNG, SVG and print PDF), Instant Puzzle Books (a book PDF assembled straight from your current page settings), Puzzle Book Studio Creative (one puzzle collection, full book editing) and Puzzle Slides. Creative already batches, too: one run, one Quantity, a book’s worth of puzzles. Productivity adds Time Saver, which queues several different settings in one pass — an easy chapter, a harder chapter and a grid chapter together — plus JSON export and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity, which combines several collections into one book. If you already own the Time Saver add-on or bundle, that covers Time Saver here too. Creative + Interactive and Productivity + Interactive add online play, so the same puzzles become browser games on your own site. You can move up to a higher edition later, so start with the one that fits what you are making today. See Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.
Honeycomb is sold on its own.
Commercial rights: Creative carries the licence to sell the finished puzzle products you make — books, worksheets and printable packs — to your own readers and customers, including KDP, Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers. Productivity adds the right to sell or supply the puzzles themselves to other publishers and sellers.
Preparation
Open Puzzle Maker Pro and choose Honeycomb from the puzzle list. The first time you generate on a new machine, Honeycomb fetches its word and clue data — a few megabytes, once — and caches it locally, so every run after that works offline.
If you want to hide your own phrases in the boards, have them ready — a name, a greeting, a punchline, the week’s spelling focus, a chapter title, up to 40 characters each including spaces. You can type them straight into the Creator, load them from a plain text file, or have the AI Word Assistant suggest them, so there is nothing to prepare in advance unless you want a long list ready to paste. One thing worth knowing while you write them: go easy on J, Q, X and Z. Those letters are often absent from a board, and any letter the board does not use is printed in the key rather than hidden on it.
The five built-in presets are the fastest way to see the range: [Easy Stroll] (a 7-hex board, Easy), [Standard] (the default 10-hex board, Easy), [Brain Burner] (a 19-hex board, Regular), and [Grid 4×3] (12 hexes) and [Grid 4×4] (16, both Regular) for the aligned grid shape. Load one, then adjust.
Choose the Shape and Size
Everything about the figure lives on the Grid Settings tab.
Use custom shape is ticked by default, so a fresh form starts on the free-form builder. Untick it and the Size dropdown takes over, offering the three flower shapes: Small (7 hexes, so 7 clues), Medium (19, the dropdown’s own default) and Large (37).
Leave it ticked and you choose between two builders:
- Organic builds a symmetric flower from a Widest row and a Total rows (odd) count. The default 4 by 3 gives rows of 3, 4 and 3 — a ten-clue page that suits most books better than the 19-hex Medium flower. Rows must be odd, and no more than twice the widest row minus one.
- Grid builds straight rows and columns from Grid rows (3 by default) and Grid columns (4 by default), up to 8 each. The columns line up vertically, and vertically stacked hexes share two letter cells instead of one, so more of each answer’s letters are confirmed by a neighbouring word.
Two more controls on this tab decide how the answers read. Start marker chooses what marks each answer’s first cell — None, Dot, or Arrow (the default, which also shows the reading direction). Read clockwise sets the direction every answer on the page follows; clear it for counter-clockwise pages.
The number of clues on a page is simply the number of hexes: 7, 19 or 37 for the three flower sizes, whatever your Organic rows add up to (10 for the default 4 by 3), and rows × columns on a grid.
Set the Difficulty and Quantity
Difficulty, also on the Grid Settings tab, controls vocabulary rather than geometry: Easy (the default) keeps to everyday six-letter words, Regular opens the full vocabulary while still preferring common words. It is the lever for making an easier and a harder version of the same book — same shape, same styling, two runs.
Quantity, on the same Grid Settings tab, is how many puzzles this run produces. Each puzzle gets its own board and its own answers while sharing the layout and styling you have set.
Hide a Phrase in the Board
The Hidden Words tab is where your own words go. A hidden phrase is a second puzzle layered on the first: once the solver has filled the hexes, a handful of cells carry a small number in the corner, and reading those letters in number order spells your phrase in a key table printed under the board.
Type your phrases into the box, one per line — or separate them with | on a single line, whichever you find easier — or switch to From file and point at a plain text file of them. AI… opens the shared Word Assistant if you would rather have it suggest a themed set. Lines beginning with # are ignored, so you can keep notes in the same list. Each phrase can be up to 40 characters including spaces; letters and word gaps are what survive, so “Don’t stop!” becomes DONT STOP. Keep every entry inside that limit and make sure each one holds at least one letter: the run checks the whole list before it generates anything and names the entry it cannot use, so a stray | or an over-long line stops the run rather than quietly shifting your phrases onto the wrong puzzles.
Phrase order, the combo above the box, decides how the list is dealt across the run, and the three settings differ in what happens once the run is longer than the list. Round robin (the default) cycles: puzzle 1 takes the first phrase, puzzle 2 the second, and after the last one it starts again at the top, so every puzzle gets a phrase however long the run is. Fixed order walks the list once and stops — puzzle 1 takes the first phrase, puzzle 2 the second, and any puzzle past the end of the list is an ordinary Honeycomb with no phrase in it, which is how you put phrases on the first few pages of a chapter only. Random picks one per puzzle, so repeats are possible. Want twelve different phrases across twelve puzzles? Write twelve and leave it on Round robin.
The phrase goes on after the board is filled, so it never changes the answers or the clues — it is a layer on an ordinary Honeycomb. When a board has no spare cell holding one of your letters, that letter is printed in the key instead of numbered on the board, and the run tells you how often that happened so you can see it at a glance. Rare letters are the usual cause, but it can also happen to a common one when a phrase needs it more times than the board has cells to give.
Leave the box empty and every puzzle is a plain Honeycomb.
Choose Where the Clues Print
The Clues tab decides where the clue list ends up, and the choice depends on what you are making. Making a book? Leave it on Classic — In Image bakes the clues into the picture, which is what you want for a standalone worksheet and not what you want for a book page, so switching after the fact means re-running the batch.
- Classic (Instant Puzzle Book only) — the default — keeps the clues out of the puzzle image and hands them to the book pipeline, which lays them out on the page around the puzzle. Use this when the puzzle is going into a book you are assembling in Puzzle Maker Pro, whether that is Instant Puzzle Books or Puzzle Book Studio.
- In Image (Can not be edited) draws the clue list into the puzzle image itself, so the exported picture is a complete, self-contained page — a worksheet, a blog post, a printable. The wording is fixed at render time, so review the clues first (below).
Choosing In Image turns on the settings beneath it: Position (Bottom by default; also Top, Left and Right), Columns (2 by default, up to 6), and Puzzle area (%) (65 by default), which divides the canvas between board and clues from 20% up to 80%. The clue text wraps and indents automatically, and the font sizes itself to the space you have left it.
Review the Clues Before They Print
Clue text is drawn automatically from the built-in clue library, and it is worth reading before it reaches a printed page — particularly for a classroom audience.
Tick Review/edit clues before creating (one dialog per batch) on the Clues tab, and the next Create run pauses once, after the puzzles are generated but before anything is drawn. A single dialog shows the clues for the whole batch, page by page, and you can rewrite any of them. Nothing is composed or rendered until you close it, so what you approve is what prints — on the image and in the exported JSON alike. Preview skips the dialog, so use Create when you want to edit.
Inside that dialog you can also have the AI write the clues for you once AI is set up under Settings → AI Services (the AI buttons stay greyed until it is): pick a style — Standard, Cryptic, Humorous, Quick, For kids, Trivia, Fill in the blank, Synonym, Riddle, Rhyming, Anagram, Educational or Storybook — then use AI: Rewrite all… for the whole batch, AI: Fill empty for anything blank, or AI: Rewrite selected for just the rows you have highlighted on the page you are viewing. The same word gets the same clue everywhere it appears in the batch. Every AI clue lands in the grid as ordinary editable text, so you still have the last word on it.
Save edited clues to my clues (reuse in future puzzles) stores your wording against the word itself, so future puzzles using that word inherit your clue. Leave it unticked and the edits apply to this run only. Close the dialog with Save to carry your edits into the render; Cancel renders the batch with the clue text as it was generated. Save needs every clue on every page to have text in it, so fill any row you have emptied before you leave the dialog.
If the puzzles are going into a book on the Classic route, these edits travel with them: the crossword clue editor in Puzzle Book Studio is the second place the same text can be changed, so do the pass once, in whichever of the two suits you.
Style the Board
The Style tab carries the standard Puzzle Maker Pro design controls plus two that are specific to this module: Numbered Hex Fill, the colour behind the numbered hexes, and Clue list font (in-image word list). The mechanics are the same on every module (Honeycomb’s tab carries the cell, border and canvas controls), so see How to Customize Puzzle Designs in Puzzle Maker Pro for how they work.
Set the Title
Titles are set on the Titles tab, using the shared Smart Titles control — the same one on every module, so How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro covers how it works. What is specific to Honeycomb is the list of options:
- Honeycomb.Size — the module name and the board size, e.g. “Honeycomb Medium”
- Honeycomb.Difficulty — the difficulty on its own, e.g. “Easy”
- Honeycomb.SizeDifficulty — both, e.g. “Honeycomb Medium – Easy”
- Custom — your own text
The size in those titles is whatever names the shape you are building. Untick Use custom shape and it is the flower size, so you get “Honeycomb Medium”. On the custom shapes it is the dimensions you set, so the default Organic 4 by 3 titles itself “Honeycomb 4×3” and a Grid 3 by 4 titles itself “Honeycomb 3×4” — useful when a book mixes shapes and you want the page to say which is which.
The same option set feeds the Description field beneath the title, which starts from the module’s own default, “Read a 6-letter word around each numbered hex”.
Create Your Puzzles
Press Create in the main toolbar. Each puzzle in the run gets its own board, its own answers and — if you filled the Hidden Words tab — its own phrase, all sharing the shape and styling you set. Every puzzle comes with its matching solution page, so the answer key needs no extra step.
If any of your hidden-phrase letters could not be placed on a board, the run says so in a short notice, with the letter count and how many puzzles were affected — letters like J, Q, X and Z are the ones that usually do it. Those letters are printed in the key table rather than numbered on the board, so the puzzle still works as it stands — the notice is there so you can swap a phrase if you would rather have every letter hidden.
Export Your Puzzles
Puzzles export as JPG, PNG, transparent PNG, SVG and print-ready PDF on every paid edition, with a matching solution page produced alongside every puzzle.
Every paid edition also produces Puzzle Slides, an interactive PowerPoint deck for classroom and group use. Productivity adds JSON export, and on Creative + Interactive and Productivity + Interactive the same run produces HTML output — an exported HTML page plus a ZIP for the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin, so the puzzles become playable games on your own site, hidden phrase and all.
Those three — Slides, JSON and HTML — each have their own tick box under Output, and they start switched off. Tick the ones you want before you press Create, and use Create rather than Preview: a preview draws the puzzle picture and stops there.
For a whole book rather than a page, keep Classic clues and send the collection to Puzzle Book Studio; see Puzzle Book Studio Tutorials. To run several different Honeycomb settings in one pass, use How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver.
Outcome
You have a set of Honeycomb pages with puzzle and solution, built on the shape you chose, carrying the phrases you chose, with clue text you have read and approved, in the formats your book or site needs.
FAQ
How long can a hidden phrase be?
Up to 40 characters including the spaces between words, which is comfortably a short sentence. Letters and word gaps are what get used, so punctuation and capitalisation in what you type are tidied away.
Does the hidden phrase change the puzzle?
No. The board is filled first and the phrase is laid over it afterwards, so the answers and clues are exactly what they would have been without it. Solvers who ignore the numbers still get a complete Honeycomb.
How do I give each chapter of a book its own phrases?
Do one run per chapter with that chapter’s phrases in the Hidden Words tab, and combine the runs in Puzzle Book Studio. Within a single run, Round robin deals one phrase per puzzle in list order.
Can I build the puzzle from my own word list?
The board words come from the built-in six-letter vocabulary, which is what lets every hex interlock with its neighbours. Your own words go in as the hidden phrase, so a themed chapter is built from its phrases, its title and its styling — a spelling-focus phrase on every page of a unit, for instance, rather than a spelling list scattered through the answers.
Where does the clue review fit into a book?
Every clue is drawn from the clue library, so read them before a book goes to print — a page is as many clues as it has hexes, which makes a 60-page book of 19-hex puzzles around 1,140 of them. The pre-create dialog covers a whole batch in one sitting, and AI: Rewrite all… gives the book one consistent voice to spot-check rather than read cold.
How do I make an easier and a harder version of the same book?
Keep the shape and styling and change Difficulty between runs — Easy for everyday words, Regular for the full vocabulary. Changing Size instead changes how long the puzzle takes rather than how hard each answer is.
Can I change the clues before they are printed?
Yes. Tick Review/edit clues before creating on the Clues tab and the next Create run gives you one dialog for the whole batch before anything is rendered, where you can rewrite clues by hand or have the AI write them in any of thirteen styles — from plain Standard definitions to Cryptic, Humorous, Riddle, Fill in the blank, For kids and more.
What formats can I export?
JPG, PNG, transparent PNG, SVG and print PDF on every paid edition, each with its solution page, plus Puzzle Slides. Productivity adds JSON, and the Interactive editions add HTML output for web play. Slides, JSON and HTML each have their own tick box under Output — switch on the ones you want before you press Create.
Do I need to be online to generate puzzles?
Only the first time on a new machine, when the word and clue data is fetched and cached. After that Honeycomb generates offline.
Further Reading
- How Honeycomb Puzzles Work — the rules and a solving routine
- How to Customize Puzzle Designs in Puzzle Maker Pro — the shared styling controls
- How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro — how the Titles tab works
- How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver — running many settings in one pass
- Puzzle Book Studio Tutorials — turning a collection into a finished book