Puzzmo
released on Oct 19, 2023
The (new) place for thoughtful puzzles. From award-winning game designer Zach Gage and engineer Orta Therox, along with Hearst Newspapers, Puzzmo is a fresh spin on a cultural mainstay: the newspaper games page.
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I definitely burn through like three of the daily puzzles each day and then I’m like well. I don’t really feel the need to play any of the other ones. Decent daily alternative to a NYT (if the pricing is competitive - I got into Puzzmo early and just bought a permanent license) but if we’re being totally honest you get wayyyyyyyy more out of the NYT sub if you’re trying to play more than one crossword in a day.
A great collection of puzzles, with a cross|word that doesn't take hours to complete (for me). Modern crosswords with helpful hints and fun formats, and the rest of Zach Gage's games are always a hit.
I’ve tried out all the games on offer in Puzzmo, but Crossword is the only one I’ve clicked with. Fortunately I’ve really clicked with it, currently keeping a 53 day streak going!
Just as Zach Gage did with Good Sudoku, Crossword adds enough clever little tweaks and helpers onto an existing game that I was finally able to learn to enjoy the underlying game in a way I’d always wanted to. Adding lines to show where spaces will break up multi-word answers is a great addition, but the hint system is the real key here.
Every crossword clue also provides you with an optional hint. It took me a few games before I started taking advantage of these, instead trying to clear each puzzle with a perfect “no hint” result. However the interplay between hint usage and time penalty adds a great opportunity for strategy. Each hint adds 30 seconds onto your timer, so if you’re taking more than 30 seconds to work out a clue, you likely would have been better off in the long run taking the time hit earlier with the hint.
With that in mind, more strategy comes with the location of the word that you want a hint for, where a hint spent on a long word that intersects multiple others will probably end up being more valuable than a short word off in a corner. This combined means that when I play now, I’m rushing my way through the crosswords, strategically looking for the next clue that I think I have the best change of solving, and if none are left, looking for the next best place to spend a hint while it’s still worth my time to do so. Not really how I expected to approach a crossword game, but a lot of fun!
One other note on Crossword is that they did show difficulties early on, but these have since gone away. Though it was nice to have an idea of what you might be in for, my wife and I often found they didn’t match up with our experiences, so I think removing them is the right call. With the hints being on a range of international topics, and the puzzles changing daily and presumably not having a huge amount of testing data, I can absolutely see how subjective a difficult rating would end up being.
Just as Zach Gage did with Good Sudoku, Crossword adds enough clever little tweaks and helpers onto an existing game that I was finally able to learn to enjoy the underlying game in a way I’d always wanted to. Adding lines to show where spaces will break up multi-word answers is a great addition, but the hint system is the real key here.
Every crossword clue also provides you with an optional hint. It took me a few games before I started taking advantage of these, instead trying to clear each puzzle with a perfect “no hint” result. However the interplay between hint usage and time penalty adds a great opportunity for strategy. Each hint adds 30 seconds onto your timer, so if you’re taking more than 30 seconds to work out a clue, you likely would have been better off in the long run taking the time hit earlier with the hint.
With that in mind, more strategy comes with the location of the word that you want a hint for, where a hint spent on a long word that intersects multiple others will probably end up being more valuable than a short word off in a corner. This combined means that when I play now, I’m rushing my way through the crosswords, strategically looking for the next clue that I think I have the best change of solving, and if none are left, looking for the next best place to spend a hint while it’s still worth my time to do so. Not really how I expected to approach a crossword game, but a lot of fun!
One other note on Crossword is that they did show difficulties early on, but these have since gone away. Though it was nice to have an idea of what you might be in for, my wife and I often found they didn’t match up with our experiences, so I think removing them is the right call. With the hints being on a range of international topics, and the puzzles changing daily and presumably not having a huge amount of testing data, I can absolutely see how subjective a difficult rating would end up being.
Provavelmente o melhor app de puzzle de jornal disponível hoje, é uma pena que seja só em inglês. Eu acabei perdendo meu combo de semanas e dei uma largada, mas se você manja da língua (ou quer jogar coisas como o Really Bad Chess), vale a pena demais.
Very sleek and fun "modern daily newspaper" type experience, the perfect way to learn that I do not know how to spell very well and that all my friends are much smarter than me.