A shelf of daily puzzles, and somewhere to play them together

Why it is like this

Millions of people do a daily puzzle every morning, and almost all of them do it alone. The bit that gets shared afterwards is a grid of coloured squares pasted into a group chat, which is a scoreboard for a game nobody else was playing. The obvious thing missing is a way to play it together, and the reason nobody has it is not that it is hard. It is that accounts, installs and scheduling kill the idea before anybody gets to the puzzle.

So the whole thing is built around one link. You make a lobby, paste it into the chat, and whoever taps it is playing in about ten seconds. Nobody signs up, nobody downloads anything, and the person who turns up four minutes late joins the standings on zero rather than being locked out.

The other decision worth naming is that a round is scored by where you came, never by your raw score. You cannot honestly add a sudoku time to a number of guesses to a distance in kilometres. Rank you can: inside a round everybody played the same board of the same game, so whatever that game’s difficulty is, it is identical for everyone and cancels out. It is the only scheme where a badly judged difficulty curve cannot decide who wins, and it is why a run of wildly different games still adds up to one fair table.

What it deliberately does not do

• No chat, and no messages. Not an oversight. The only thing one player can show another here is the name they choose, which keeps the whole moderation problem down to one short string and means a stranger has no way to contact anybody.
• No account required, for anything. An account carries your streak between devices and puts your name on a board. That is the complete list of what it is for.
• No notifications and no nagging. Nothing will email you to say your streak is about to end.
• No bare totals. Every score is broken into the things that made it. If a screen ever shows a number with nothing explaining it, that is a bug.
• No puzzle that needs a guess. Sweep is checked to be solvable by logic alone, and so is Gridlight. A puzzle you can lose to luck is one nobody can be good at.
• No state carried by colour alone. Every colour signal is paired with a glyph or a word, which is the fix the famous word game has never made.

Who makes it

One person, in the United Kingdom, in evenings and at weekends. Puzzle Party is the fourth small browser game in a set that also includes Aux Wars, Shareholder Party and Tavern Party. They share no code and no accounts. They share a taste for games that are free, quick, and do not want your email address.

If something is broken, or a puzzle was unfair, or a word list has a word in it that should not be there, say so. A daily game lives or dies on one bad morning and I would rather hear about it. Get in touch.

On the games themselves

Several of these are our own build of an idea you will recognise. Game rules and mechanics are not protected by copyright in the UK or the US. What is protected is the expression, meaning names, artwork, text and layout, and we use none of anybody else’s: every game here is written from scratch, given its own name, and carries no trade mark belonging to anybody. Where a game uses a word list or a dataset, it is named on the licences page.