Contributors and reviewers
Puzzles here are built by one group of people and independently checked by another. These are the people who do it, and the open work the site is built on.
Founder
Builds the engines, the site and the writing.
Developer
Develops puzzles and shapes the interface.
Reviewer
Checks puzzles for difficulty and fairness before they are published.
Players who report problems
The most useful contributions come from players. Reports that weekday grids felt unfairly long are what triggered the difficulty rebuild for the Daily puzzles, and the time targets were rewritten because people said solves were taking twenty minutes when they should have taken eight. Those messages changed the puzzles other people solve today.
Open data
The word games are built on freely available language data. Word frequency ranking comes from Peter Norvig's published word count data, derived from a large corpus of web text, which is what allows the engine to tell a common word from an obscure one. An open English word list supplies the dictionary that decides whether a guess is a real word.
Frequency data alone is not enough to choose answers: it ranks brand names and foreign words highly. Every answer that reaches a puzzle is filtered by hand on top of it, as described in the editorial policy.
Open source
The site runs on work maintained by other people. It is built with Next.js and React, written in TypeScript and styled with Tailwind CSS. Database access uses Drizzle, sign-in uses Better Auth, printable packs are produced with PDFKit, and articles are rendered from Markdown with marked. Hosting is provided by Vercel and the database by Neon.
Become a contributor or reviewer
Every puzzle on this site is machine-verified, but a person still decides whether a puzzle is worth solving. If you enjoy puzzles and would like to help review them for difficulty and fairness, or you build puzzle engines and want to add a type, get in touch through the contact page.
Reporting a broken puzzle or an error in an article is just as useful, and needs no commitment at all.