The blog for puzzmo.com news and updates.| blog.puzzmo.com
One of the unique features of Puzzmo as a platform is that we show you a visual representation of the puzzle you are about to solve before you play it. This preview of each puzzle is a core part of what we think makes Puzzmo special. For some games, this preview is enough of the puzzle that you can actually solve the whole puzzle without actually clicking into the puzzle at all.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Every day when I wake up and play Puzzmo, after I enjoy some of the classics, I play several games that aren’t out yet. Lately, as we have more and more games at all stages of development, I’ve found my personal Puzzmo page is looking less and less like all of yours. So we’re trying something new — we’re releasing one of those half-baked games as a very experimental limited run.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
For both Zach and I, working offline was one of the core tenets of “being an app”. So, perhaps the majority of the four months I worked on the app was within this space. There is no such thing as just “add offline mode” though, its like a tonne of small systems that all together interlock to get you a tight experience when you’re on the subway and/or off wifi. It’s really something that needs to be thought of from the get-go and constantly kept up to date.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Well, “finally” we got a Puzzmo iOS App. From day 1, I had been anticipating needing to build a native app for Puzzmo eventually, in part because of Zach’s rich history of shipping iOS games but also when you tell someone you make games one of the first questions they ask is “do you have an app?”. My theory on blogging has always been write what I wish I had read at the start of a project.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
This is kinda an off year for working on the parts of puzzmo.com which users see for me, followers of Puzzmo in the discord might note that Saman and Lilith have been the vanguard on the big, now shipped, re-design effort focusing on the navigation, today page and the play game page. Me? I was working on the iOS app, which is mostly invisible work but my main focus is ole’ bizdev.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Like many companies, we schedule by quarters. So far, we’ve had a tick-tock strategy of a game launch with a lot of application and API infrastructure and one with less, this gives us a chance to release some big changes and then refine and try apply it to the back catalogue. For 2025, we broke this pattern for Q1 because of three major factors: I agreed to focus almost solely on writing an iOS app for Puzzmo Saman, who normally heads up our game efforts felt like it was time to take a seri...| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Every game we launched last year came with at least one big new feature: Bongo circles, Pile Up Poker Series, Weather Memoku’s weather widget. We launched game variants, customizable group leaderboards, time series sparklines on completion screens, game replays, and even a year-end recap. I could keep going. We’ve been busy since launch. Along the way, we gathered tons of valuable feedback from players about what they love and what they can’t stand about Puzzmo.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Happy new year! This changelog covers all changes since November 2024’s changelog. Here’s what’s new: Cross|word Added text formatting support to clues (italics, bold, links, and more). Adjusted the column layout on narrow desktop and tablet screens so clue lists are always wide enough to read. Adjusted the initial scale of the grid on mobile so the entire grid is always in view. Increase contrast on circle square highlights. Improved the feel of zoom and pan gestures.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
One of my goals with blogging for the last decade has been to write the blog post I wish I had had. So, with Puzzmo now migrated to two monorepos (“app” and “games”) I’d like to go through the process of setting up a monorepo and a few of the interesting trade-offs we’ve made now it’s fully settled. This post includes all the config files which makes our monorepo work and a bit of a narrative about how they came together.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Hey folks, we’ve been thinking a bit about the number of games on the homepage of Puzzmo. We started Puzzmo with 5 games, some inline ads and a couple of items which would show here or there. In the last year, the number of potential games or items which we show has really multiplied! The main grid for puzzmo currently shows info for: Games: we have 11 public games, we managed to allow for more puzzles to exist on the same space via tabs but it’s still a lot Your Updates: we show info abo...| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Hey folks, we’ve just deployed a change which removes the chat section from Puzzmo. I thought it’d be better that I also pour one out for the chat and give a sense of what we’re thinking in that space and what’s happening a bit behind the scenes on the site. At the core of the problem: Chat was not pulling its weight, we have tens of thousands of logged in users, but usually have under ten chat messages posted across friends and groups per day.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Here’s what’s new in games since the last changelog. Bongo Released a new game, Bongo. Play it now! Memoku Fixed a bug where sometimes the time displayed on the end screen could be incorrect. Spelltower Added additional 3, 4, and 5 letter words to the word list. Cubeclear Added additional 3, 4, and 5 letter words to the word list. If you have any feedback or just want to talk about these changes, join our Discord!| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
We’re just over a year since Puzzmo was launched to the public, and it’s time to pull out an old Artsy tradition: writing up some of our technical choices for the year. This builds on the prior “what did we launch” blog post, but with a significant slant towards the tech powering instead of user-facing features. Team wise, today, we have two engineers solely focused on the games (and occasionally touching the front-end of the app), an engineer focused on the API and then me, who will ...| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Here’s what’s new in games since the last changelog. Weather Memoku Released a new game, Weather Memoku. Play it for free on Weather Channel’s Puzzmo page, or anywhere if you are a Puzzmo subscriber. Cross|word Added a new user profile statistic for plonks. Fixed bug that could cause plonks to be miscounted if the player exited and revisited the game. Fixed a bug where the color of letters could be incorrect after the completion animation completes.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Today, we announced Puzzmo’s first crossword book. It contains 30 crossword reruns from 2024, 10 book-exclusive crosswords, more than 10 pages of paper remixes of Flipart and Really Bad Chess by Zach and Jack, and a few quick essays from the three of us. You can place an order here! The book is very Puzzmo-coded! We’ve included word separation boundaries in the grids, and have a QR code that’ll let you access all the hints.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Aspects of the launch When we were spec’ing out what the Pile-Up Poker launch would look like, it was a pretty overwhelming list: A new, fully polished, game A “pro” version of the game A “series” infrastructure for games to account for many plays of one game per day A “go to next game” recommendation system A system for each player having a unique puzzle An early-access system for press A new system for marking games the next day as being “Fantasyland” Custom event hooks in...| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Hey folks, we’ve been reflecting on the Pile-Up Poker launch and one of the things we’ve come to understand is that we can have a difference in how we approach secrecy between the games and the rest of Puzzmo. Games as a medium is a pretty high stakes, “winner gets mindshare” ecosystem where a good idea is copied and replicated very quickly. Replicating the app and infrastructure for Puzzmo however, is a much trickier game for others to pull off.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Here’s what changed in our games over the last month. Crossword Added a new crossword social share image that visualizes plonks. Added the “Wall clock time” leaderboard, which tracks the duration between the moment the daily crossword puzzle is published, and the moment it’s completed. Typeshift Fixed a bug where, if the “confirm word submission” option was turned on, the game could not be completed in some specific cases. Pile-up Poker Added Pile Up Poker Pro 🃏.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Today, we’re excited to announce that there will be more puzzles on the Today page each day, along with a new way to organize those puzzles. We wanted to come up with a way to provide same-difficulty puzzles each day, while also catering to our players who enjoy the difficulty scaling throughout the week. To accomplish this we’re going to be adding more daily puzzles for some of our games.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Hey folks, this week we’ve had a think about how we can ensure some of the long-term systems running in Puzzmo keep running smoothly. We concluded that there are two things we should probably do to keep site speed up, and keep costs down. We are removing the stats displays on games completed before April 1st, 2024. The version of Puzzmo which launched, and the Puzzmo we all use today may visually look very similar, but under-the-hood things are quite different.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Hi, Saman here! This is the first of what I hope will be many monthly changelog posts. Note that our team relies on a continuous release process, so while these changelogs will only come once the month, the changes themselves will roll out as they’re completed. The changelogs are therefore always a summary of changes that are already live. Here’s what changed in our games over the last month. Crossword Removed the hint time penalty, and added a cooldown period for hints (Read Hints v2: Mo...| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Hi all! Madison (Puzzmo’s Cross|word intern) here! For the past eight weeks, I have been working closely with Brooke on various Cross|word tasks. I have had the opportunity to observe and take part in all the work that goes into publishing Puzzmo Cross|words, and even try my hand at constructing! You can read more about my thoughts on reviewing submissions, editing, co-constructing my first puzzle, writing hints, test solving and fact checking, and end-of-internship reflections in more deta...| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
With the $50 billion dollar mark passed on the Pile-Up Poker launch fund we’re releasing a re-think of how Groups Clubs work in Puzzmo. TLDR: Groups are now called clubs, you do not need to have Puzzmo Plus to create your first club and clubs can have leaderboards. Starting today, you’ll see a way to quickly create a club with a leaderboard based on the game that you just completed!| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Today we’re launching v2 of our Cross|word hint system! We’re ditching time penalties for a cooldown timer that appears if you use three hints in quick succession. The details are towards the end of the blog post here. Puzzmo’s quest to make crosswords more approachable Crossword puzzle solving has a learning curve. There are tons of guidelines that crossword constructors and editors adhere to, and in general these conventions aren’t written down anywhere.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
After we launched Puzzmo, there was this moment of “well… what now?”. Zach and I had such a complete vision of what we wanted to build for v1 from the idea phase 3 years ago. We even got a bit of extra time for polish pass due to wanting the acquisition to happen before launch, so to a reasonable extent, we had a solid version 1 we were proud of. We’d never really talked about version 2 in concrete though, and on top of that, our team had just tripled in the last month.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
When I decided on Hugo for this blog, I knew I was gonna have to take a hit on something I felt was very important to me and my writing: fancy tools for syntax highlighting. I choose Hugo because it should be super easy for folks to contribute (no fancy Node tooling setup etc) - so I have Shiki being applied as an optional post build step. First up, we need to disable the current syntax highlighting for codefences by editing hugo.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
It was 8 years ago when I made my first change to a GraphQL API. My next, real schema change came along a bit later and looked like this: name: { type: GraphQLString, }, + description: { + type: GraphQLString, + }, image: Image, artists: { type: new GraphQLList(Artist.type), We’re talking about the early days of GraphQL, and may even have pre-dated the Schema Definition Language (SDL) being in the spec.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
With the launch of Pile-Up Poker we knew that we wanted to sell a pack of cards. Systemically thinking, this meant a few requirements for what it would mean to buy a physical item from us: We want admins to handle inventory We want to work with third party fulfillment tools We want people who sign up during the launch period to get the cards for free We want folks who had already signed up, to get it for a reasonable price Folks who don’t want a Puzzmo subscription could have a route to get...| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Puzzmo has a pretty comprehensive theming system, we’ve used it to ship 8 different themes before we launched! Then we built a system which lets our partners have a custom theme based on their own site’s color themes: Now we’re bringing the ability to customize your theme to all Puzzmo Plus users! Here’s one I whipped up just now, using the excellent video game Hollow Knight’s Greenpath area as inspiration:| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Hi folks, welcome to our new blog if you’re a first time reader! ( The rest of our posts are tech stuff, which my wife described as “full of jargon”. So, it’d be very reasonable to skip. ) We’ve been trying to figure out a way to give updates on major changes to Puzzmo and thought a changelog section on the blog would do a pretty good job at that.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
This blog post is trying to do a lot, I want to look back at the initial version of Puzzmo we shipped back in November and talk through what we built. It’s a very long read, and sometimes doesn’t flow too naturally - but it’s comprehensive and a very useful reference for noting a little slice of time when Puzzmo’s users were in the hundreds. I’m mainly going to be concentrating on “Puzzmo” the system, e.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Control At heart, programming is the art of deciding which systems interact with each other and where decision making happens. This tension became very apparent as we started to first build out the leaderboard systems for Puzzmo. At the beginning, decision’s around control were easy as there was only 2 leaderboards for each game. The API would provide these two leaderboards for every game at the place where we kept the rest of the leaderboard infra.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
Premise and statistics. On December 26, 2023 I announced on Discord that from January 2 through January 9, 2024, Puzzmo players who had never previously been paid for a crossword were welcome to submit one fully-clued crossword to be considered for publication at Puzzmo. This announcement was also made in Cross|word editor notes during the submission window. The spec sheet and style guide can be found here. I sent all responses from January 17 through February 5, 2024.| Posts on Puzzmo Blog
The blog for puzzmo.com news and updates.| blog.puzzmo.com
Alright, that’s a very straight faced title. Might force more folks to read the contents. When I was planning on leaving working on TypeScript full-time, I looked around for a few interesting places to work in Microsoft/GitHub instead of founding Puzzmo with Zach. One of the teams I had interacted with a bit during my time at Microsoft was the GitHub Copilot team, they had just finished up LiveShare and were really starting to see some interesting results in the auto-complete space.| blog.puzzmo.com
It is wild to think that it has been only a handful of weeks. Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate. Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of goi...| blog.puzzmo.com