Features
This section illustrates special features of PuzzleMe™, which has the most advanced features of any online puzzle experience. Most features are seamlessly supported across game types. Be sure to also check out the PuzzleMe™ gallery which illustrates different use cases and verticals that make use of these features.
Image clues
All PuzzleMe games support multimedia in the form of video, audio and images. Depending on the game type, media can be embedded in questions, clues, grid, backdrop, or other game elements. Our player provides a smooth media experience on devices of all sizes with the ability to blow up an image or video if needed. You can also include attribution and copyright messages for media.
Click here to play this crossword puzzle and figure out where Homer disappears.
Video clues
Whether you are a professional constructor or a novice, you can use PuzzleMe to enliven your puzzles with video clues. Expert puzzle constructor Will Nediger added some video clues to his puzzle, “Pivot to Video” using PuzzleMe (self-referentially, the video clips are about crosswords themselves!). You can use Youtube links for videos (with the ability to start at a given time), or provide other video formats, such as mp4.
The video clues can also have text and/or media components, so if need to serve offline or print users, you can still retain text clues that don’t depend on multimedia.
Audio clues
Games can have incorporate provided in the form of MP3 or OGG files. For example, this crossword is about famous speeches from American history. This one from Morning Brew incorporates advertising jingles.
You can also include audio as part of the overall game experience – for example, by playing different sounds when a user enters a correct or wrong answer.
Crucigramas
Some puzzles in European languages do not use clue numbers to associate clues with answers, but instead have column and row numbers. PuzzleMe can support this “chess numbering” format easily for any language including Spanish and French.
El Pais, a leading news publication in Spanish uses PuzzleMe to run several types of games in Spanish, including crucigramas, mini crucigramas, sopa de letras and sudoku,
Mots croisés
Acadie Nouvelle, a French newspaper in New Brunswick, Canada, uses PuzzleMe to run French puzzles in 2 series: a daily 12×12 puzzle, and a larger subscribers-only, 20×20 contest puzzle on Saturdays. Acadie Nouvelle directly enters their syndicated print puzzle into PuzzleMe’s puzzle editor to make it playable online. It takes 15 minutes a day to enter a puzzle, and many weeks’ puzzles can be entered in advance. The puzzles automatically go live at the scheduled publication time, so that no management of the crossword page is needed on a day to day basis. Click here for the live “Mots croisés” site.
Palavras Cruzadas
In some crossword formats, clues are written directly inside the grid (see image on the left for a typical Slovak puzzle), sometimes along with arrows. This layout is sometimes called “arrowword” (or “Mots Fléchés” in French). While it is suitable for a large printed page, it is difficult to read on small screens. Such puzzles can automatically be reformatted by PuzzleMe to a regular format to make them playable online (see image on the right). The clues are written outside the grid, but the grid layout and clues are exactly the same.
Click here to play the Slovak puzzle pictured alongside or here to play a “Palavras Cruzadas” puzzle in Portuguese. These puzzles have both been reformatted from the original arrowword.
Innovative grids
This is a crossword puzzle on India that ran in the BBC’s Listener magazine in April, 1930. Its grid is shaped like a map of India and the clues and answers are a wonderful reflection of the subcontinent’s history (including the archaic British spellings).
The online version illustrates PuzzleMe’s support for odd-shaped grids (using void cells), cell background colors, and barred grids. Click here to play it online. You can also see the original puzzle in the Listener’s archives. (Puzzle content (c) Listener magazine.)
With PuzzleMe, grid cells can have many decorations, such as circles, thick walls and even images.
This Spyscape crossword is an example of a puzzle with an image in the grid. You can insert an image into a grid with the PuzzleMe editor.
Pre-roll and customized messages
PuzzleMe can invoke a video pre-roll to a VAST-compliant ad server (such as DFP) before the puzzle picker is loaded. For an effective implementation of video pre-roll, see The Washington Post crosswords.
You can also introduce customized HTML messaging at the start of a puzzle, at the end of a puzzle, or when the puzzle is paused, with embedded video. The messages could reflect anything from a customized brand asset to an embedded video to a sponsor’s message. The New Yorker crosswords include their iconic cartoons in their pause and completion messages. The completion message links a featured reference in the puzzle to a related article from their archives as a way of driving deeper engagement into the site.
Word search puzzles
This is a large word search puzzle from Auspac, Australia. It illustrates PuzzleMe’s ability to have unusual shapes and holes in the grid for word search puzzles (also called “WordFind” in some countries). The hole could optionally be filled with an image, instructions, a sponsor’s message, etc.
This is also a 2-layered puzzle, which makes it more fun than normal word search puzzles. Finding all the words in the grid, and reading the remaining letters across the grid reveals the phrase “Climbing trees in the park”. Click here to play a live version.
Word search with clues
PuzzleMe Word search has another twist: it can include clues as well. So instead of directly listing words to find in the grid, you could have multimedia or text clues that players have to solve first. Try this word search with pictures of famous Indian cricketers from yesteryear!
The Morning Brew newsletter makes excellent use of word searches with images. Try this puzzle on dog breeds or this puzzle on car logos.
Sudoku tutor
Supported Languages
PuzzleMe Sudoku supports the full range of Sudoku puzzles including 9×9 (with easy, medium, hard and expert levels of difficulty), 16×16, Sudoku X, Killer Sudoku and different sizes such as 6×6, 8×8, 10×10, 12×12 and 16×16. It has all the features you’d expect like pencil mode to jot down candidates, conflict marking and customized L&F options. But it also has features you’d not expect, like a clever Sudoku tutor that teaches users how to get better at Sudoku. The tutor gives step by step hints for the simplest tactics, such as elimination, to the most advanced, such as “X-Wing” and “XY-Wing”, which are needed to solve “impossibly hard” puzzles. And PuzzleMe Sudoku also has social play, so you can play Sudoku with friends too!
We can provide you readymade Sudoku puzzles at varying levels of difficulty and size. You can also import your own Sudoku puzzle files or type them into PuzzleMe if you wish. The same puzzle management workflow for crosswords applies to Sudoku and wordsearch puzzles too, making it easy to manage all your puzzles consistently.
Uniquely, PuzzleMe enables multiple people solve a puzzle simultaneously. Simply click on the multi-player icon in the navbar to add a friend to the puzzle. You can invite friends with a link that can be sent along any social sharing channels, or via a short invite code.
While playing, different players cursors are represented in different colors. If they are on desktop devices, players can also chat in real time using the chatbox at bottom right.
Social Play is available for all game types supported by PuzzleMe.
At Amuse Labs, we are passionate about languages and like to support as many of they as we possibly can. Currently, we support the following languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Norwegian, Danish, Polish, Chinese, German, Slovak, Italian, Urdu, Arabic, Hebrew, Afrikaans, Chinese, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati, Bengali and Tamil. Our own compact on-screen keyboard for mobile devices is available for most of these languages, including phonetic keyboards for Indic languages.
Click here to see demo puzzles in some of these languages.
If your language is not listed here, please get in touch!
Wordoku and Picdoku
Wordoku and Picdoku
Lest you think Sudoku is just for number geeks, try this Wordoku puzzle where the rules are the same as Sudoku, but the letters are changed to GANDHI 150! The Hindu ran this puzzle to mark Mahatma Gandhi’s 150 birth anniversary. With PuzzleMe, you can solve Sudoku puzzles with any other letters or even emojis.
Also shown alongside is this Picdoku puzzle with patterns instead of numbers. Play sudoku with your own set of personalized images!
You can easily convert any Sudoku puzzle to a wordoku or picdoku puzzle using the PuzzleMe editor. Our sudoku tutor will work with these formats too!
PuzzleMe™ has many more features. Feel free to login and explore the platform. We can provide other word or logic based games on request. Please contact us to discuss how PuzzleMe can help you.