How Puzzmo aims to beat the New York Times at its own game
Zach Gage plays Apex Legends “almost every day”. (He’s a Bangalore main, if you’re curious; hence his development partner Orta Therox chipping in with “Lifeline!”) That fact might seem tangential to the developer’s latest project, but it’s key to how it all began, with Gage thinking seriously about games that have become more than games; the kind that become habitual. “Minecraft or Roblox or League Of Legends – these are all games that have really substantial platforms,” Gage begins. “They’re a social space you can go to and interact with people. Roblox in particular is a place you go to hang with your friends, and there happens to be games there.”
He considered how he might create something similar for the type of game he makes: puzzlers such as Knotwords, SpellTower and Really Bad Chess. “A platform for a very specific kind of game, and a kind of game that I feel has been under-platformed,” he elaborates. Just before he shares his screen over Zoom, we notice his smile has reached his eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited to be showing a thing that I’ve been working on.”
Seconds later, we get our first glimpse of what he’s been teasing. Puzzmo is not a game, but a platform for games – specifically Zach Gage-developed puzzle games. Anagram puzzler TypeShift is there, alongside SpellTower and Really Bad Chess, each subtly altered in presentation or mechanics for daily play in a browser (it’s playable on mobile, too, though an app is in the offing next year). The newly designed Flipart invites you to rotate shapes to fill a rectangular grid, while Wordbind gives you a long word in which you can identify shorter ones.
Perhaps most significantly, there’s a crossword at the top, which ties into one of the most important things about Puzzmo: the layout. We’re immediately struck by the fact that it resembles the puzzle page of a newspaper, a design choice Gage recognised was crucial from the start. Pitching a puzzle game is difficult, he says, “because the only thing that’s cool about it is the rules. And that’s doubly hard if you’re trying to pitch a game to people who don’t care about [traditional] videogames, which is like the Wordle audience or the SpellTower audience. So it was like: ‘How do we build this thing in a way that gets people to be interested in this type of game?’”
The solution came when he started to think about the types of game his mother would play. “All the games she plays are newspaper games, and she got into them because she read the newspaper and they were just there,” he says. “She would play the crossword and next to the crossword would be a sudoku, and eventually she tried the sudoku. That moment of j
