What is a series?

Objective

Understand what series are, why to use them, and discover how to organize puzzles effectively using real-world examples.

Series allow you to organize and manage puzzles from creation through publication. Conceptually, you can think of a series as a folder on your computer that groups similar items together. Beyond their organizational benefits, here are a few other reasons why you should consider using series:

1. Consistent look and feel: Apply common branding elements such as fonts and colors across all puzzles in a series. This ensures that puzzles of the same type share a cohesive visual identity. Explore more about customizing here.
2. Analytics: Group puzzles of a similar type under one series to easily track and compare their analytics. Doing so helps you understand player engagement and performance trends. Learn about analytics.
3. Manage shared settings: Control settings like the start and end messages, security and privacy at the series level. This saves times and ensures consistency across all puzzles within that series. Explore settings.
4. Showcase using a series picker: Use the series picker to display and allow players to browse puzzles from a specific series on your website. This makes it easier for your audience to play more puzzles and keep coming back for me. Explore the series picker.

Use cases

Some ways you can use series as organizing tools:

1. By puzzle type: Use series to curate puzzles of different types. For example, you might have one series for Crosswords and another for Word Searches.
2. By variations of same puzzle type: You can organize puzzles based on size, difficulty, frequency of publication, and more. For example, if you offer multiple difficulty levels for Sudoku — Easy, Medium, and Hard — you can create a separate series for each. Similarly, you can group Crosswords by grid size, with one series for Mini Crosswords (5×5) and another for Large Crosswords (11×11). Or let's say you have daily Mini Crossword and a monthly Large Crossword. Given the publishing cadence (daily and monthly) and grid size are different, you can keep them in two separate series.

Example

The LA Times Games page offers both multiple puzzle types (Crossword, Wordflower, Word Search) and variations of the same type (Mini Sudoku, Easy Sudoku, Expert Sudoku), making it a useful reference for organizing your own games.

3. By theme: A history-themed puzzle? Or perhaps one about the Harry Potter universe? Curate a thematic series for a particular occasion or an audience.
4. By publication: If your organization manages multiple publications that cater to different audiences (across different geographical areas, or perhaps different languages), you can use series to organize puzzles for each publication separately.
5. Workflow management: You can create a series and maintain a series for draft puzzles. This is where you would edit and review the puzzle before copying it over to another series containing puzzles which are to go live. Essentially, you can use series to manage the workflow from creation to publication.