Colin Richardson is a self-proclaimed word puzzle enthusiast, he has lived in Orange for seven years now and says it’s the longest he’s ever lived anywhere his whole life, having called New Zealand, Papa New Guinea, South East Asia and Africa home, just to name a few.

“I like words, I like word puzzles,” Colin smiled, “Making them is sometimes more fun than solving them, it’s a process as you see how many words you can crowd into the one puzzle.

The first time I created a Find-A-Word was just to simply see if I could do it.

When we were living in Zaïre (now renamed Democratic Rebublic of Congo), we had electricity on our station for maybe one and a half hours a night and that was it. We could never get enough diesel to run the generators. The station we were at had an air strip so power was needed most of the time. So, in any case, there was no TV, there was radio to some extent, but you make your own entertainment. That’s when I completed one of the puzzles, and since then I have completed four or five.

The process is quite fun and interesting to do. Basically, to make a long list of names and see which ones you can fit in. It takes days, first of all you’ve got to get the list of words you want to use on your topic. I might have had 200 or so words in a puzzle but I had 300-400 names to pick from,” Colin laughed. “One of the making techniques I used was alphabetical lists and then breaking it down by the length of the names.”

Colin admits his puzzles are a little challenging. “Mine can be backwards, forwards, up or down, diagonally or in any direction. Now and then I give it to family members to have a go at, though it has to be people who are really interested in word games to get the biggest kick out of it.”

You’ll find Colin’s Find-a-Words in our below. Give it a go, can you complete it?