There’s a word that keeps coming up whenever a major publisher enters the puzzle space: original. As in, “Will they actually create something original, or just copy what’s already out there?”
It’s an understandable question. But it’s also the wrong one - because it misunderstands how puzzles become cultural phenomena in the first place.
The honest answer? Puzzles almost never become global hits because they’re “purely original.” They become global because someone takes a familiar ingredient, executes it brilliantly, and gets it in front of a mass audience. That’s not a scandal. That’s the craft.
Why Wordle feels like Mastermind - and why that’s the point
Take Wordle - widely loved, genuinely brilliant, and structurally very close to Mastermind (an old board game from 70s) in how it works as a thinking loop. In both, you make a constrained guess, get feedback that tells you which parts are correct, update your next guess based on that feedback, and repeat until you crack the pattern.
Mastermind does it with colour pegs. Wordle does it with five-letter words and positional colour coding, adding the extra constraint that every guess must be a valid word, which fundamentally changes the strategy and the feel of solving.
That similarity doesn’t diminish Wordle’s achievement. It explains it. Wordle took a proven cognitive loop and repackaged it as a frictionless, daily, shareable ritual. The mechanic was familiar. The product was new.
The pattern holds outside puzzles too
Look at The Traitors. It’s built on social deduction: hidden roles, deception, accusations, eliminations. That’s the same broad mechanic family as Among Us (PS4 multiplayer game) - and both are descendants of party games like Mafia and Werewolf, which trace back to a late-1980s experiment in Russia.
None of that is a criticism of The Traitors or Among Us. It’s the lesson. Cultural hits often happen when someone takes a reliable “human behaviour loop” and translates it into a new context with better delivery. The same principle applies to puzzles.
The three places originality actually shows up
If “original” doesn’t mean “invented from nothing,” then what does it mean in puzzles? I’d argue it shows up in three distinct places, and understanding these is crucial for anyone building or evaluating puzzle products.
Original mechanic - this is the unicorn. Genuinely new rules, new constraints, new mental moves. It’s rare because most of the fundamental cognitive actions (pattern recognition, deduction, constraint satisfaction, spatial reasoning) have been explored for centuries. When it happens, it deserves loud applause.
Original execution - this is where most winners live. Same core mechanic, but a new “feel”: better onboarding, smarter difficulty curve, more satisfying reveals, cleaner interface, a stronger “one more go” loop. This is why the big publishers keep winning. They’re not always more original in the mechanic sense - they’re better positioned to iterate, test, polish, and distribute at scale.
Original context - hugely underrated. Sometimes the real innovation isn’t the puzzle itself - it’s where it lives and why people do it. LinkedIn launching daily games to spark workplace conversation. Netflix building a puzzle hub tied to fandom and rewards. Bloomberg creating Alphadots, where wordplay meets data literacy. That’s not puzzles for puzzles’ sake - it’s puzzles as community glue, identity, retention, and wellbeing. And that kind of innovation is wide open right now.
The New York Times proves the point (and it’s not an insult)
If we want an honest conversation about originality, we have to start with the most successful modern puzzle publisher on the planet.
The New York Times reported 11.1 billion plays across its games portfolio in 2024. Their growth hasn’t come from inventing new human brain behaviours from scratch. It’s come from taking familiar puzzle DNA, improving the design, pacing and satisfaction, and scaling it through a massive audience.
Connections sits in the same “group the items” family as Only Connect’s connecting wall. Strands is, at heart, a word search with smart twists. Pips is domino logic at daily cadence. Crossplay is explicitly Scrabble-adjacent multiplayer word building.
None of that stops them being excellent. In fact, it’s the point. They improve the form, make it work beautifully in a digital context, and then their audience makes it mainstream. That’s exactly how Candy Crush Saga didn’t invent match-3 - it industrialised it, and a whole wave of variations followed for a decade.
Where genuine innovation deserves applause
So if most hits are brilliant remixes, where is real “new format” energy? Let me highlight three UK examples that deserve credit, because they create a genuinely different solving rhythm rather than just reskinning a familiar grid.
Cogs (The Telegraph) - rotating letter blocks to form words. It feels tactile and mechanical, like constructing something rather than just filling in blanks. The solving sensation is distinct.
PlusWord (The Telegraph) - crossword energy plus a modern extraction finish with a gentle nod to Wordle. Solving the crossword reveals a hidden word, which gives the whole thing a satisfying “complete” feeling that a standard crossword doesn’t deliver.
Quintagram (The Times) - five clues, fixed number of letters, no grid, constraint-led solving. It carries “crossword brain” energy without the traditional format, and it feels like a genuinely fresh format identity.
These matter because they show what innovation often looks like in practice: new format feel usually comes from combining familiar pieces in a way that creates a new satisfaction loop.
Innovation isn’t only about mechanics
Globally, some of the most interesting moves aren’t new puzzles at all. They’re new contexts for puzzles.
The Atlantic has deliberately built a games hub as a product pillar, not a gimmick. Apple News+ introduced an emoji-based daily game - native to the platform in a way that feels designed for the medium. The Guardian expanded beyond classic word and number formats with a daily football guessing game and tile-based film reveals, reaching audiences who’d never consider themselves “puzzle people.”
This is the bigger trend: puzzles moving from “something you do” to “something you are” - a daily identity habit with the same normalcy as tracking your steps.
“Original” is often user-relative, not industry-relative
Here’s the part that puzzle insiders sometimes forget: originality is experienced, not declared. If someone has never solved a cryptic crossword, a cryptic is wildly original to them - and the delight is real either way.
The goal isn’t to impress industry veterans with novelty. The goal is to create that “click” moment for the player - the instant where the mechanic makes sense, the difficulty feels fair, and the solve delivers a tiny rush of satisfaction. That click usually comes from great constraint design, elegant UX, smart difficulty ramping, shareable outcomes, and habit formation.
The route to a phenomenon is never “never seen before”
The pattern is almost always the same: familiar mechanic, improved execution, mass audience, mainstream habit, endless variations.
So let’s stop pretending puzzle history is a museum of untouched inventions. It’s a workshop. Always has been. And right now, the workshop is booming.
Long live the remix.