Shitsumon ga aru. Can you find four kanji, and arrange them in a 2x2 grid, where each kanji forms a compound with the kanji vertically and horizontally adjacent? If someone’s atama is especially ii, maybe you could try a 3x3 grid!?!?
Good luck!
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Yes you can, and in fact I’ve seen Sudoku-esque puzzels like this in Japan.
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練習
物性
Is this hypothetical or did you have a specific puzzle in mind?
This is hypothetical! I’m trying to find Kanji boxes with the very few kanji I’m using with WaniKani and others I knew already. I find playing with new information helps me keep it upstairs for longer.
I wonder if this can be done with 四字熟語 
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I wrote a tiny program that looks through EDICT2 for pairs of three-kanji words with two overlapping kanji. But it didn’t find any! My hope was to create a 3x3 square like
ABC
BCD
CDE
where ABC, BCD, and CDE are all valid compounds.
It found very many fun kanji rectangles, though. Here are some with entirely JLPT N5 kanji:
大学生 (university student)
半年後 (after half a year)
(columns: 大半 majority, 学年 school year, 生後 post-natal)
日本食 (Japanese food)
中国人 (Chinese person)
(columns: 日中 daytime, 本国 one’s own country, 食人 cannibalism)
EDIT: I fixed a bug in my program, and found some cool 3x3 squares. Such as:
Rows:
同一人 (the same person)
国家間 (cross-national)
民族学 (ethnology)
Columns:
同国民 (fellow countrymen)
一家族 (one family)
人間学 (anthropology)
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I remember posting somewhere a link to a game like that. Maybe in the ultimate resources thread?
I’m on my phone, so it’s a bit hard to look it up right now, but I’ll post it here as well when I find it.
Edit: found it, it was indeed in the ultimate resources thread. but it’s slightly different from what @jakemurphy was asking for (I didn’t read properly, I guess). It’s a cool game too, though.
Colour me impressed!!! I’m looking forward to having more Kanji under my belt so I can start figuring out things like this de novo with a pen and paper when bored. Thanks for all the replies! <3
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