Puzzmo is imagining a better newspaper games page

theverge.com:

For more than a decade, designer Zach Gage has been building an impressive library by reimagining classic games. There have been remixes and updates to everything from chess to solitaire to sudoku, along with inventive word games like Knotwords and SpellTower. But now, as these kinds of games have reached a whole new level of popularity thanks in large part to the explosive success of Wordle, Gage and a small team have been crafting something bigger: a platform called Puzzmo that aims to reinvent the classic newspaper games page by bringing it online.

“There’s great stuff out there,” Gage says of the space. “But there isn’t this holistic place where people can go and build a community around these games.”

Puzzmo launched last week, albeit in a limited form. Right now, 500 keys are being released daily, which also allow invitees to bring along friends. (In order to accept the invite, players, naturally, need to solve a series of puzzles.) But the core of the concept is already in place. When you visit the Puzzmo homepage, you’re greeted with a collection of games, along with things like a list of leaderboards and the day’s news. It looks like this:

According to Gage, the games were all designed to be intriguing at a glance, while the front page layout is meant to put them front and center. “Most of the games pages we see, not just the Times but everywhere, it’s just a list of links to games, which is really not a platform,” he explains. At launch, the site includes a handful of Gage’s previous games — SpellTower, Really Bad Chess, and Typeshift — along with a new puzzle game called Flipart and the always-important daily crossword puzzle.

Puzzmo comes at a time when this style of game has become big business, led largely