I'm still having a lot of fun releasing daily puzzles for my game Tiled Words: https://tiledwords.com
It just won an award! It was awarded Players' Choice out of 700 daily web games at the Playlin awards: https://playlin.io/news/announcing-the-2025-playlin-awards-w...
Right now around 3,500 people play every day which kind of blows my mind!
It's free, web-based, and responsive. It was inspired by board games and crosswords.
I've been troubleshooting some iOS performance issues, working on user accounts, and getting ready to launch player-submitted puzzles. It's slow going though because I have limited free time and making the puzzles is time consuming!
Here's an article with more info about the award: https://cogconnected.com/2026/03/tiled-words-crowned-the-pla...
That's a lot of fun, good work.
I don't play every day, but I've been a big fan of Tiled and showed it to a number of other folks.
Thank you so much for keeping it going!
Thanks for playing and sharing!
How did you go from 0 users to 3,500? Genuinely curious how people get their games off the ground.
It's been a gradual process over the last 5.5 months. Here are some of the things that worked for me:
- I applied to showcase the game at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game Squad. They accepted me so I was able to showcase it at the expo for a day. This got me some players right off the bat
- I shared it on HN, Reddit, Mastodon, etc.
- The website Thinky Games wrote an article about it
- The YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic shared it which got a lot of new players. More recently a couple of other YouTubers (Timotab and Stro Solves) have been posting videos regularly
- I link to it from my blog, and this unrelated rant went semi-viral in web dev circles: https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/shadcn-radio-button/
- Winning the award gave me more visibility and players
I've also tried using things like Instagram and Discord but haven't had much luck there. I don't really get how those platforms work.
To be honest I'm not great at marketing. I've just been experimenting and seeing what works.
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I would say the most important thing is the game itself:
- I've worked hard to gather feedback and incorporate it into the gameplay.
- I focus on keeping the puzzles fresh and striking the right difficulty level. (Challenging but something most people can do in 10 minutes.)
- I built a sharing feature that ~300 or so people use a day
I think all my marketing would have been useless if people didn't like the game and want to play again and share it with their friends.
I remember seeing this! It was cool, and I will remember to play it more.
Re creating puzzles, does this mean you have to manually do them one per day? Is there a way to automate them ahead of time (as in have an app generate a bunch of puzzles you can pick from or tweak)?