Here's a site for kana/kanji crosswords: http://kanji-sudoku.com/crossword-puzzles.html - English to Japanese only, it seems (Edit: and vice versa). Some JLPT stuff in there too, I think.

Example: http://kanji-sudoku.com/kanji-crossword-...zle-1.html

I also recently obtained a book, Easy Japanese Crossword Puzzles: Using Kana. It goes from J-E and has E-J too. Too bad there's no monolingual ones I can find right off, but shouldn't be too hard to make some kana-->kanji puzzles using one of those online generators, or perhaps if one is bored, to find pictures for a set of English clues...

And of course, as the URL suggests, there's links to sites with kanji sudoku freeware and shareware as well--ie sudoku puzzles with kanji numerals. Here's the page for that: http://www.kanji-sudoku.com/recommendations.html (scroll down a bit)

There's also cryptograms and stuff. I'm really diggin' this site.

I resurrect you!!

Here's some kana word-search games: http://www.laits.utexas.edu/japanese/jos...i/kana.php

Maybe there's some easy tools out there for us to make our own like this or puzzles/games, from books/anime/movies/etc.?

Here's something to make your own wordsearch puzzles (or シークワーズ).

http://www.armoredpenguin.com/wordsearch/

Pretty customizable. You can import word lists, too. *

Same with crossword puzzles: http://www.armoredpenguin.com/crossword/

*Make sure txt is in UTF-8 or something.

I think I decided on how to implement both crossword puzzles and wordsearch (see above for making your own) for now, at least.* Something to tinker with that might be superfluous, but fun...

For crossword puzzles, I will create a list of words from either 'mature' cards or the opposite, persistent leeches. I have not yet decided the criteria. But I might, since it's a crossword and will have intersecting words, select multiple words per kanji (search for a kanji in Anki browser). The 'clues' will be Japanese sentences, with the answers cloze deleted (fill in the blanks).

For wordsearch (or シークワーズ), I think I am going to periodically collect groups of words from the interfaces of various Japanese websites/software applications. You could add them as single word cards in Anki (since often they will be presented singly or in brief sentences as you encounter them in interfaces), likely they'll be a mix of kanji and katakana, and you can get used to quickly skimming/processing them by scanning for them in wordsearch patterns. I think you could apply the logic behind this to other sources/media ecologies as well.

*Eventually I intend to use wordsearch for longform text-related exercises, but right now I want to focus on shortform language components.