Notes from the studio

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Dive into our world of puzzle creation, game development insights, and the joy of problem-solving.

October 7, 20267 min read

The Solver's Dozen: Twelve Evidence-Backed Rules for Better Puzzling

A season of essays on the science, math, and history of solving, distilled to one page: twelve rules with receipts - from pigeonhole counting to walking away on purpose - that make any grid, and most problems, yield sooner.

October 4, 20266 min read

The Brainteaser Interview: What Hiring Got Wrong About Puzzles

For twenty years, tech companies hired people by asking why manhole covers are round. Then one of the biggest of them checked the data and called it "a complete waste of time." A puzzle site's honest take on what puzzles can and cannot tell you about a mind.

October 1, 20266 min read

Dominosa and the Broken Chessboard

Cut two corners off a chessboard and no arrangement of 31 dominoes will ever cover it - provable in two sentences, unbelievable until you see it. The coloring trick behind that classic powers domino puzzles, physics, and the art of proving "never."

September 28, 20266 min read

God's Number Is 20: What the Magic Cube Taught Mathematics

Any scramble of the 43-quintillion-position cube can be solved in 20 moves - never more. Proving it took thirty years, borrowed supercomputers, and a question named after God. The gap between 20 and how humans actually solve is the interesting part.

September 25, 20266 min read

Why Explaining a Puzzle Out Loud Solves It

Programmers confess their bugs to rubber ducks and the bugs surrender. Psychology has been documenting the trick since 1989 - plus the strange case where saying it out loud makes you worse.

September 22, 20266 min read

Galaxies: The Puzzle Where Every Move Happens Twice

Its original Japanese name is a bilingual pun - astral show, point symmetry - and a puzzle where each deduction instantly buys its mirror twin. On solving with symmetry, and why physics is played the same way.

September 19, 20266 min read

The Ostomachion: Archimedes and the Oldest Puzzle We Know

A prayer book sold at auction for two million dollars turned out to hide Archimedes' lost notebooks - including a 14-piece puzzle that may be the birth certificate of combinatorics. Its solution count took until 2003 to find: 17,152.

September 16, 20266 min read

Futoshiki and the Arrow of Inequality

Futoshiki means "inequality," and its little arrows never tell you what a cell is - only what it's bigger than. A guide to solving with chains, ceilings, and floors, and the branch of math that lives between the cells.

September 13, 20266 min read

Desirable Difficulties: Why Comfortable Practice Makes Weak Solvers

Fifty years of learning research converges on an uncomfortable law: the practice that feels most productive teaches the least. What testing, mixing, and struggling actually do - and how to aim your puzzle habit at growth.

September 10, 20266 min read

The Crossword Contest That Recruited Codebreakers

In 1942, a newspaper ran a puzzle speed contest - and the War Office quietly hired the winners. On Bletchley Park, the D-Day crossword panic, and why puzzle minds have always been weapons-grade.

September 7, 20266 min read

Twenty Questions with Claude Shannon: How Much Is a Clue Worth?

In 1948 an engineer who juggled on unicycles invented a unit for information itself. His "bit" explains why twenty questions can find one thing in a million, why cryptograms are crackable, and what a good puzzle clue actually does.

September 4, 20267 min read

How a Computer Solves Sudoku (and Why It Does It Backwards)

Your solver of choice cracks any Sudoku in milliseconds - but not the way you do. Inside constraint propagation, Knuth's dancing links, and the strange fact that the machine's hardest puzzle isn't yours.

September 1, 20266 min read

Nurikabe: The Wall That Builds Itself

Named for a ghost that blocks travelers on dark roads, Nurikabe asks you to flood a grid with one connected sea around numbered islands. Its secret: connectivity is a clue - some cells are black simply because nothing could ever reach them.

August 29, 20266 min read

The Pigeonhole Principle: The Simplest Idea That Keeps Winning

Ten pigeons, nine holes - some hole holds two. From this one observation: why two Londoners share an exact hair count, why no compressor shrinks everything, and why your best Sudoku moves were pigeonhole arguments all along.

August 26, 20266 min read

Calcudoku: The Classroom Invention That Teaches Without Teaching

A Tokyo cram-school teacher who refused to lecture invented a puzzle instead - "cleverness squared" - and it spread from his classroom to newspapers worldwide. The story, the philosophy, and the arithmetic that cracks it open.

August 23, 20266 min read

The Einstellung Effect: When Experience Blocks the Answer

In 1942, a psychologist showed that practice can make people worse at seeing easy solutions. Eye-tracking studies of chess masters later revealed the mechanism - your eyes literally keep returning to the idea you already had.

August 20, 20266 min read

Why Puzzle Grids Are Square (and What Happens When They Aren't)

Only three shapes can tile a flat plane by themselves, and puzzles overwhelmingly chose one of them. On the quiet geometry beneath every grid - bees, Kepler, and the hobbyist who found the "impossible" tile in 2023.

August 17, 20266 min read

Light Up: The Puzzle Named After a Real Math Problem

Its Japanese name means "Art Gallery" - and mathematicians had been guarding art galleries since 1973. How a museum-security theorem, a three-color proof from The Book, and a grid full of light bulbs illuminate each other.

August 14, 20266 min read

The Birthday Paradox and Other Lies Your Intuition Tells

Twenty-three strangers in a room make a shared birthday more likely than not, and ten thousand letters - a thousand from PhDs - once insisted a correct probability answer was wrong. On the math our guts reliably get backwards.

August 11, 20266 min read

Fleet Puzzles: The Logic of the Hidden Ships

The guessing game from rainy afternoons has a solitaire cousin with no guessing at all - born in Argentina, adopted by the World Puzzle Championship, and secretly a masterclass in bookkeeping, water, and where big things can't fit.

August 8, 20266 min read

The Four Cards Almost Everyone Gets Wrong

Psychology's most famous logic test is four cards and one rule, and fewer than one person in ten solves it. The reasons we fail - and the one costume change that makes us all geniuses - explain what puzzle practice is really for.

August 5, 20266 min read

The Tower of Hanoi and the Art of Thinking Recursively

A French mathematician sold a toy in 1883 with a legend attached: when its 64 golden disks are finally moved, the world ends. The math says we're safe for 585 billion years - and the solution method quietly teaches recursion, the most powerful idea in problem-solving.

August 2, 20266 min read

Skyscrapers: The Puzzle You Solve by Standing Somewhere

Every clue in a Skyscrapers puzzle is a view down a street - count the buildings you can see and the skyline assembles itself. A field guide to vantage-point logic, plus the lovely mathematics of "records" hiding in the clues.

July 30, 20266 min read

Four Colors, and the Proof No Human Has Ever Read

A student coloring a map of England in 1852 asked a simple question that humiliated mathematics for 124 years - surviving a false proof that stood for a decade, and falling only to the first great computer-assisted proof in history.

July 27, 20267 min read

Cheryl's Birthday and the Logic of What Other People Know

In 2015, a homework question for Singaporean teenagers broke the internet. Its secret weapon - reasoning about other minds reasoning about yours - powers a whole genre of puzzles, and a surprising amount of computer science.

July 24, 20266 min read

Knights, Knaves, and the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever

Raymond Smullyan - magician, concert pianist, logician - built an island of perfect liars and perfect truth-tellers, and used it to smuggle deep mathematics into party riddles. His tradition ends at a puzzle formally titled the hardest ever.

July 21, 20266 min read

The Waiter's Memory: Why Unfinished Puzzles Won't Leave You Alone

A 1920s psychologist noticed that waiters remembered orders only until the bill was paid. Her discovery - the Zeigarnik effect - explains cliffhangers, to-do list anxiety, and the strange gravity of a half-finished grid.

July 18, 20266 min read

Mine-Counting Puzzles and the Million-Dollar Question

The little grid of hidden mines that sat on every office PC turns out to contain one of the deepest open problems in mathematics. Inside the numbers: logic circuits, a $1,000,000 prize, and the honest truth about the 50/50 guess.

July 15, 20266 min read

How to Read a Nonogram: The Arithmetic That Paints Pictures

A nonogram looks like a picture waiting to happen, but it solves like arithmetic. One simple counting trick - overlap logic - unlocks almost every grid, and the reason it works says a lot about how information hides in plain sight.

July 12, 20266 min read

The Fifteen Puzzle Hoax That Fooled America

In 1880, a sliding-tile puzzle drove two continents to distraction - and America's most famous puzzlemaker spent decades claiming credit for a craze he never started, dangling a $1,000 prize he knew he would never pay.

July 7, 20266 min read

Why the Answer Comes When You Walk Away

You stare at a puzzle for ten minutes and see nothing. You come back the next morning and the move is simply there. That experience is real, measurable, and one of the best reasons to solve daily.

June 20, 20266 min read

Six Sextillion Grids: The Mathematics of Sudoku

There are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 valid Sudoku grids, no puzzle can have fewer than 17 clues, and your morning solve is secretly graph theory. A tour of the mathematics hiding in 81 cells.

June 3, 20266 min read

From Euler to the Daily Grid: A Brief History of the Logic Puzzle

The grid you solved this morning is the descendant of an emperor's turtle, a mathematician's officers, a retired architect in Indianapolis, and a Tokyo publisher named after a racehorse.

May 16, 20266 min read

What Daily Puzzles Do to Your Brain

Brain training was oversold, then over-debunked. Here is what the research actually says about a daily puzzle habit - the real benefits, the honest limits, and why the daily part matters most.

April 29, 20266 min read

What AI Actually Does in Game Development

Artificial intelligence has been part of games since Pac-Man. Here is an honest tour of what it really does behind the scenes today - and what still belongs to human designers.

April 15, 20266 min read

The Grid as a Garden

A puzzle is not a battlefield to conquer. It is a garden to tend - a space where patience, attention, and care produce something orderly and beautiful from an initial tangle of possibilities.

April 13, 20266 min read

When Stuck Is the Point

We treat being stuck as a problem to escape. But the stuck moment - the pause before insight - is where the deepest learning happens. Being stuck is not the obstacle. It is the work.

April 11, 20266 min read

The Language of Logic

Logic is a language, and like any language, it must be practiced to become fluent. Puzzles are the conversation that makes you fluent in reasoning.

April 9, 20266 min read

Puzzles and the Present Moment

A logic puzzle demands your full attention. Not yesterday, not tomorrow - right now, this cell, this constraint. Puzzles are one of the few activities that reliably pull you into the present.

April 7, 20266 min read

The Quiet Joy of Completion

In a world of endless feeds and infinite content, there is something radical about finishing. A completed puzzle is a rare thing: a task with a definite end.

April 5, 20266 min read

Thinking in Layers

The best puzzle solvers do not think about one thing at a time. They think in layers - holding multiple constraints, multiple possibilities, and multiple levels of reasoning simultaneously.

April 3, 20266 min read

Why Hard Puzzles Feel Good

Difficulty is not the enemy of enjoyment. It is the source of it. The puzzles that challenge us most are the ones that satisfy us most deeply.

April 1, 20266 min read

The Art of Starting Over

Restarting a puzzle is not failure. It is the decision to approach a problem fresh, unencumbered by mistakes you have already learned from. Starting over is its own skill.

March 30, 20266 min read

Constraints as Creative Freedom

We think of constraints as limitations. But in puzzles and in life, the right constraints do not restrict creativity - they enable it by narrowing the infinite to the possible.

March 28, 20266 min read

The Puzzle as a Mirror

Every puzzle reflects your thinking back to you - your habits, your shortcuts, your blind spots. Solving is not just logic. It is self-observation.

March 26, 20266 min read

The Map Is Not the Territory

A puzzle grid is a simplified model of a complex logical space. Puzzles train us to build good mental models, test them, and revise them when they fail.

March 24, 20266 min read

Small Wins and the Compound Effect

Each cell you solve in a puzzle makes the next one slightly easier. This compounding mirrors life: small daily wins accumulate into something much larger than any individual effort.

March 22, 20266 min read

The Space Between Moves

The best puzzle solvers do not rush. They pause. They scan. They let the grid breathe. The deliberate pause before acting is where real thinking happens.

March 20, 20266 min read

Lessons from an Empty Cell

An empty cell in a puzzle is not nothing - it is potential. It holds every possible value until logic narrows it to one.

March 18, 20266 min read

Why We Solve What We Do Not Need To

No one needs to solve a Sudoku. There is no reward, no practical output, no one waiting for the answer. So why do millions of people do it every day?

March 16, 20266 min read

The Elegance of Inevitability

The most beautiful puzzles are the ones where the solution feels inevitable in retrospect - not obvious, but the only way it could have ever been.

March 14, 20266 min read

Patience Is a Skill, Not a Virtue

We treat patience as a character trait you either have or you do not. Puzzle solvers know it is something you practice.

March 12, 20266 min read

The Myth of the Eureka Moment

We romanticize the flash of insight, but breakthroughs are built incrementally - one small step at a time.

March 10, 20266 min read

What Puzzles and Music Have in Common

Both puzzles and music create tension and resolution - and both reward patience with moments of deep satisfaction.

March 8, 20266 min read

The Case for Doing One Thing at a Time

Multitasking is a myth. In a world of split attention, the ability to do one thing at a time is becoming a superpower.

March 6, 20266 min read

Digital Campfires

When millions of people solve the same daily puzzle, they participate in a collective ritual - a digital campfire we all gather around.

March 4, 20266 min read

The Grammar of Grids

Puzzle grids have their own visual language - a syntax of rows, columns, and regions that anyone in the world can read without speaking a word.

March 2, 20266 min read

The Comfort of Constraints

Freedom sounds appealing until you have too much of it. Logic puzzles reveal why limits are not obstacles - they are what make thinking possible.

February 27, 20266 min read

The Paradox of Doing More

AI promises to help us do more with less. So why does it feel like we are working more than ever?

February 21, 20266 min read

The Quiet Satisfaction of Proof

Every number you place in a logic puzzle is not a guess. It is a proof. And that feeling of certainty is rarer than you think.

February 17, 20267 min read

The Universe Is a Logic Puzzle

Galaxies, atoms, and Sudoku grids have more in common than you think. The universe runs on constraints - and so do the best puzzles.

February 14, 20266 min read

How Puzzles Train Your Brain to See Patterns

The more puzzles you solve, the more your brain learns to spot hidden structures - and that skill transfers far beyond the grid.

February 12, 20266 min read

The Beauty of Elimination

The most powerful move in a logic puzzle is not placing the right answer. It is crossing out what cannot be true.

February 10, 20266 min read

The Lost Art of Thinking Slowly

In a world built for speed, logic puzzles ask you to do something radical: take your time.

February 8, 20266 min read

Why Simpler Rules Make Better Puzzles

The best logic puzzles are not the ones with the most rules. They are the ones where a handful of constraints create surprising depth.

February 4, 20266 min read

Logic Puzzles vs. Word Puzzles: Which Should You Play?

Crosswords and Sudoku both call themselves puzzles, but they exercise different mental muscles. Here is how to choose.

February 1, 20265 min read

Pencil Marks: The Secret Weapon of Expert Solvers

The difference between struggling and solving often comes down to notation. Here is how experts keep track of what they know.

January 30, 20266 min read

The Science Behind the "Aha" Moment

That sudden flash of insight when a puzzle clicks is more than just satisfying - it is your brain at its best.

January 29, 20267 min read

Understanding Puzzle Difficulty (And How to Choose the Right Level)

Difficulty is more than grid size. Learn what makes a puzzle harder and how to pick the best level for your mood.

January 27, 20266 min read

How to Build a Daily Puzzle Habit That Sticks

Small routines beat big bursts. Here is a practical, low-friction way to turn puzzle solving into a daily ritual.

January 25, 20267 min read

How We Ensure Every Puzzle Has a Unique Solution

A behind-the-scenes look at the checks, tests, and design rules we use to guarantee fair, satisfying logic puzzles.

January 23, 20266 min read

Why One Solution Is Great Puzzle Design

A single valid solution makes puzzles fair, teachable, and satisfying. Here is why uniqueness matters and how designers achieve it.

December 27, 20256 min read

Designing Holiday themed puzzles

How we built Spooktober for Crowns: a seasonal event with its own leaderboard, bespoke puzzles, and a picture-first design language that made every deduction feel like a tiny story.

May 10, 20254 min read

Our New Streamlined Blogging System: Powered by Markdown!

We've upgraded our blog! Discover how we're now using a dynamic Markdown-based system for faster, easier content creation and what it means for you.

May 8, 20257 min read

Top 10 Must-Try Logic Puzzle Games for Enthusiasts

Discover our list of the top 10 logic puzzle games that will challenge your mind, including favorites like The Talos Principle, Baba Is You, and our own unique offerings.

March 22, 20258 min read

Top 10 Things to Consider When Designing Levels for Logic Puzzle Games

Creating engaging and well-balanced levels for logic puzzle games is both an art and a science. Whether you're designing levels for Sudoku, Binary Sudoku, or other logic puzzles, these key considerations will help you craft experiences that challenge and delight players.

March 11, 20258 min read

Puzzle Games: The Future of Educational Technology

Explore how puzzle games are transforming education and why they should be part of every learning toolkit.

March 8, 20257 min read

The Hidden Benefits of Playing Puzzle Games (From a Dev Who Builds Them)

Discover the science-backed cognitive benefits of incorporating puzzle games into your daily routine.

March 4, 20256 min read

Introducing Binary Sudoku Plus: Clean, Fair, Binary Logic

Meet our latest puzzle game that challenges players to create perfect symmetry through strategic tile placement.

February 19, 20255 min read

The Art of the Puzzle (And What We've Learned Building Them)

Discover the fascinating world of puzzle design and how we craft engaging challenges that captivate players minds.

February 15, 20254 min read

Aquarium Is Here: Water Logic With Zero Guessing

We're excited to announce the release of Aquarium, our latest logic puzzle game that challenges players to solve water-filling puzzles.