How We Built Mini Cross With AI: A Daily Crossword, a Streak Ladder, and a Pipeline That Crossed Its Own Boundary

The NYT Mini popularized a specific shape of puzzle: small grid, single shared puzzle per day, streak tracking that compounds across weeks. Mini Cross takes that shape and renders it in a cyber-terminal aesthetic - phosphor green on near-black, monospace clue panel, scanline overlay. The game shipped at 59 out of 60 on our QA rubric across four iterations, and it's the first game in the catalog that was built across multiple cron fires of our remote build pipeline.