The PuzzleParty Story

PuzzleParty started, as a lot of good things do, with my kids.

When Wordle first appeared—before it was acquired by The New York Times—I started playing it with them. At the time, I was living in California, while they were in New York and Texas. We’d do the puzzle and text our results back and forth.

Then The New York Times introduced Connections, so naturally we added that. Somewhere along the way we discovered Mathler, and that became part of the daily routine too.

Before long, we had an informal competition going. There was a winner of the day, some bragging rights, and the occasional dispute about who was actually better. Eventually, we decided we needed data.

I volunteered to build a scoreboard.

PuzzleParty, version 0.1: Excel

My first attempt was an Excel spreadsheet.

Every day, I’d take everyone’s results and enter them into the spreadsheet so we could keep track of who was winning. I lasted a few days.

It was incredibly tedious, and because it was so tedious, we never accumulated enough data to learn anything particularly interesting. The scoreboard quietly disappeared, and the idea went onto the back burner.

But I never completely forgot about it.

Fast-forward a few years to November 2025. I was wrapping up another project and looking for something new to work on. During that project, I’d started experimenting with some of the new AI programming tools, and I wanted a project where I could really put them to the test.

The timing was fortuitous. Those tools had just taken a huge leap forward. Suddenly, the idea that had been impractical a few years earlier didn’t seem so impractical anymore.

So I decided to build the scoreboard I’d wanted all along.

The scoreboard got a little out of hand

The remarkable thing about these new development tools is how much a very, very small team—basically me—can accomplish.

I want to be clear about what that means, because I think it matters. The tools don’t replace the person building the thing. They amplify what that person can do. Every idea in PuzzleParty, every decision about how it should work and feel, came from a human being thinking about the people he plays puzzles with. The tools just made it possible for one person to actually build all of it.

What began as a simple scoreboard quickly grew.

We added standings and statistics. We added more games. We made it easy to share one result with all the different groups—or “Parties”—you play with.

And we added one of my favorite features: spoiler protection.

If you’ve played Connections, you know why this matters. Some days you finish the puzzle and immediately need to tell someone that the purple category was impossible, ridiculous, or both. But if you put that in a group text, you’ve just ruined the puzzle for everyone who hasn’t played yet.

In PuzzleParty, you can complain immediately. Your comment is there, but people don’t see your result or your comments until they’ve finished the puzzle themselves.

It’s a small thing, but it makes sharing puzzles with friends a lot more fun.

And as we kept building, something else happened that I hadn’t really anticipated.

It turns out the scoreboard isn’t the most important part

Winning is fun. I still like winning.

Although I’ve also discovered that losing can make me pretty proud. As we’ve added new games—and as my kids have gotten older and smarter—they have started demolishing me at quite a few of them.

But over time, I’ve realized that the competition isn’t really the most important part of PuzzleParty.

The connection is.

Those original Wordle texts were a tiny daily ritual between me and my kids, even though we lived thousands of miles apart. We weren’t necessarily having a conversation every day. But we were doing something together every day.

As I’ve brought more people into PuzzleParty to test it, I’ve watched the same thing happen again. There are people I now feel more connected to simply because we share our puzzles every day.

And it takes almost no effort.

Do your puzzle. Tap Share. PuzzleParty takes care of the rest, sending the result to all of your Parties. In a matter of seconds, you’ve had a little interaction with people you care about.

I’ve come to think that’s the hidden benefit of PuzzleParty—and it’s a big one.

A different kind of social

Building PuzzleParty has also made me think a lot about what has happened to social media.

It used to feel personal. Increasingly, it feels like a fire hose: advertisements for things you don’t want, posts from people you don’t know, algorithmically selected content designed to grab your attention, and so much noise that the signal gets lost.

I want PuzzleParty to be the opposite of that.

Almost everything you see in PuzzleParty should have something to do with you and people you actually know.

In that sense, the real ancestor of PuzzleParty isn’t Facebook or Instagram. It’s the group text.

Lots of families and groups of friends already have a puzzle text chain. That’s a wonderful thing. PuzzleParty just makes it much better: automatic scoreboards, standings and statistics, spoiler protection, comments and conversation, a history of how everyone has done, and multiple groups without having to send the same result over and over.

And PuzzleParty isn’t designed to consume your day.

Do your puzzles. Share your results. See how your people did. Celebrate a win. Give somebody a little grief. Complain about the purple category. Then get on with your life.

And we’re still discovering new puzzles

One of the unexpected pleasures of building PuzzleParty has been discovering just how many great daily games are out there.

We started with Wordle. Then Connections. Then Mathler. Since then, the list has kept growing.

Part of what I hope PuzzleParty can become is a way for people to discover games they never would have found otherwise—especially when somebody in their Party starts playing one and everyone else inevitably wonders what they’re missing.

So yes, PuzzleParty is still about keeping score.

It’s still about winning.

It’s even about discovering that your children have become disturbingly good at games you introduced them to.

But what started years ago as an attempt to answer a very simple question—Who’s winning?—has turned into something I value much more.

It’s a way to stay connected to the people I care about, a few puzzles and a few seconds at a time.

And that’s what PuzzleParty is really about.