I’ve been pretty open about going through it for the past several months. To cope with things, I got into NYT Games. One aspect of that is that it kinda lended me some normalcy. Daily puzzles provided me with a routine, and routines keep me grounded instead of just aimlessly drifting around. Another is that if I can’t keep my body healthy, I should at least exercise my brain. And lastly: I love Connections. I love getting purple-first wins – or Mariahs, as everyone’s favorite bald man says.

But I needed to stop playing NYT Games. I’m not gonna pretend that the New York Times is a good institution, I’m not gonna be a milquetoast lib saying it’s a good bastion of journalism for being slightly more “good” than Fox News or whatever like they do with average centrists. If anything, New York Times is pretty right-wing with its open hostility toward trans people, continually giving op-eds to guys that suck, etc, etc.

So, I needed a new puzzle-solving routine kick. And Puzzmo is there for that.

Puzzmo was a venture started in 2023 by Zach Gage and Orta Therox. Gage was already a prolific puzzle game designer for stuff on the phones and Therox is the engineer behind the project. They also collaborate with others, particularly drawing crosswords from contributors. All together, they offer a great independent alternative to NYT Games.

Puzzmo offers a good variety of puzzles. Typeshift is a basic but surprisingly difficult game where you create words with a limited amount of letters on columns that you have to move up and down. WordBind asks you to form as many words out of a phrase as fast as you can, while Bongo has you laying out a limited number of letters out on a grid, challenging you to use more valuable letters in certain positions for a higher score. Stepping away from word games, Flipart has you rotating tiles on a canvas, and it also has rarer, more evil variants where tiles are either the same color or invisible until you flip them around, calling on you to memorize things. On the subject of memorization, there’s a sudoku variant that acts as a memory game, and a similar memorization game themed after the weather.

If your main draw to NYT Games was crosswords, Puzzmo has you covered. It has a bit of a personal touch in that some clues clearly references the crossword creator’s personal interests and after clearing the crossword, you can access a short written statement from the creator and editor discussing the puzzle, which I think is nice. You can actually get clues on answers in return for a lower score that acts as smaller, easier word puzzles. Though you could also just reveal the answer entirely if it gets too trying. It acts as a pretty comfortable crossword experience that anyone can just swing into. And jeez, I really appreciate having clues because I do not know most celebrities.

But you can probably guess what my favorite offering in Puzzmo is with my open love of gambling aesthetics.

Pile-Up Poker, baby! The joy of tile arrangement with cards, I’m living for this shit! I’ll gladly risk hands to try to create a straight flush, I already do that with discards in Balatro. I might accidentally tank a round because I’m focusing too much on my discard hand and forget to form enough hands for the discard hand to be played, but that’s just how the casino rolls. It’s a shame that Pile-Up Poker scores don’t factor into your overall score, because this is my zone. I have the gambling mandate of heaven and the soul of an emperor! I will make sure I never gamble for real.

Some of the games in Puzzmo’s mix are actually small tastes of Zach Gage’s other games. 2011’s SpellTower is a game that I really got into, where you have a tower of letter tiles that you clear by spelling words. Spelling words with rarely used letters acts as a line clear, and spelling words five letters long and more creates an explosion that clears adjacent tiles. Of course it’s ideal to spell big words, but maybe you’d do some smaller clears to avoid destroying letters that’d be helpful lower down in the tower, which is particularly handy if the bottom is clustered with consonants and you need to get vowels down there. Getting full clears is really the only thing that can rival the joy of good poker hands for me.

Alternatively, you may be more familiar with Gage’s Really Bad Chess, a hellish version of chess to me. It’s truly presented here as a puzzle game, where you and the computer player have the same randomized chess pieces, and you have to figure out how to successfully checkmate the black king.

It’s also here that I’ll admit that I’m a huge dumbass at chess. Even with the powers of undos and resetting, I’ve yet to win a single game. I keep chasing instant gratification like a fool or trying to protect pieces instead of risking them for my own benefit. Though, if you’re big on chess, you’ll definitely enjoy this.

Overall, Puzzmo is a really great package. Puzzmo offers a subscription service much like NYT Games did, offering no ads, archived puzzles, leaderboards and clubs (and you could join mine shh). And you know what? I was happy to subscribe to this. Puzzmo slotted itself in my life and I spend at least an hour a day playing through stuff, so I was happy to pay up.

Also, I’m way happier to pay a subscription to a small independent group than a centrist at-best news media organization. My only wish is that Puzzmo gets a variant of Connections.