A Thank You to the Puzzle Communities That Found Us
When you build a small word game and put it on the internet, you don't really know what happens next. There's no marketing department, no launch budget — just a puzzle you hope a few people will enjoy enough to come back to tomorrow.
What actually happens, it turns out, is that people find you. And more often than not, they find you through other people who love puzzles enough to spend their free time cataloging, reviewing, and recommending them.
Over the past few months, a handful of these communities have pointed their readers toward CrossEights, and I wanted to take a moment to say thank you — and to point you back toward them, because if you enjoy daily word puzzles, these are genuinely good places to discover your next one.
DailyGameSpot
Earlier this month, DailyGameSpot featured CrossEights Daily as their Game of the Day. I found out the way you'd hope to: by watching new players show up and actually finish the puzzle. It's a well-kept corner of the internet for anyone who likes a fresh daily challenge.
Daily Games To Play
The folks at Daily Games To Play wrote one of the most thoughtful breakdowns of CrossEights I've read — they understood the scoring, the hint strategy, and the little decisions that make the game what it is. As a designer, having someone really get what you were going for is a rare pleasure.
Wordle.today
Wordle.today lists CrossEights with a 4.0-star rating across more than 130 player votes. I won't pretend I don't check that number. For a small independent game, that kind of community feedback is both encouraging and genuinely useful.
DLE Games
And then there's DLE Games, a steady, quiet source of daily puzzle players who have been finding their way to CrossEights for months. No fanfare — just a reliable stream of people who clearly love this genre as much as I do.
Why I'm telling you this
Partly gratitude. But partly because these sites deserve the same kindness they've shown us. The daily puzzle world stays healthy because of curators who play everything, write honestly, and send players to good games without asking for anything in return.
So if you've finished today's puzzle and you're looking for something new, give one of them a visit. And if you arrived here from one of them — welcome. I'm glad you're here, and I hope tomorrow's grid treats you well.
— Andres, creator of CrossEights