August 7, 2026
Crossword fans found the twist
Möbius-Strip Crosswords
A twisty old puzzle mystery has commenters amazed, confused, and nitpicking clues
TLDR: A blog post digs into whether an old puzzle inventor really made an endless Möbius-strip crossword called Pago Pago, or if later writers mashed two ideas together. Commenters were wowed by the sheer creativity, with one calling it “insane,” while another immediately turned into the clue-number police.
The real fun in this brain-bending crossword story isn’t just the vintage puzzle lore — it’s the comment section energy. Arthur O’Dwyer digs into an old claim that puzzle-maker Robert Guilbert created Pago Pago, possibly an “infinite” crossword built on a Möbius strip — basically a surface with a twist, so the puzzle could loop in a weird, endless way. But here’s the drama: even the article is a mini detective story, with O’Dwyer openly doubting whether Guilbert’s Möbius-strip idea and the mysterious Pago Pago game were actually the same thing. In other words, puzzle history may have been playing a giant game of telephone for years.
And commenters? They were delighted. One person said their partner publishes crosswords and they already knew puzzle-making was an art form, but a Möbius-strip version was just plain “insane.” That’s basically the dominant mood: admiration mixed with “who even thinks of this?” Another commenter went full nerd nostalgia, reminiscing about building a Möbius-strip-like structure out of linked lists, which is the kind of wonderfully chaotic flex the internet lives for. Meanwhile, one sharp-eyed reader brought the tiniest, pettiest, most perfect comment-thread drama by pointing out that some clues were misnumbered. Not a scandal, exactly — but in puzzle circles, that’s the equivalent of showing up with your shirt buttoned wrong. So yes, the crowd is impressed, amused, and just obsessive enough to fact-check the clue numbers while everyone else is still trying to picture a crossword tied into a cosmic knot.
Key Points
- •A 1988 *New York Times* article identified Robert Guilbert Sr. as the developer of a competitive crossword game called Pago Pago.
- •Arthur O’Dwyer found very little print documentation about Pago Pago beyond that article and a later reprinted feature about Guilbert.
- •Jonathan Guilbert said his father created a “Moebius Strip” or “Infinity Crossword Puzzle” and believed it was to be marketed as Pago Pago.
- •O’Dwyer states that he suspects the Möbius-strip puzzle and the Pago Pago game were separate projects rather than the same one.
- •The article traces how the combined claim was later repeated in works by Adrienne Raphel and Natan Last, then explores what a Möbius-strip crossword would structurally look like.