Would & Satin
One Year of Raddle
One Year of Raddle
Last year around this time, I was furiously coding and iterating on a new way to participate in Enigmarch — I had an idea for a kind of interactive word ladder that used clues to transform words from one step to the next. By late February, I was showing the first drafts of the site to beta testers. It wouldn't be until a few days into March when I felt confident enough to release it to the world.
It wasn't my intention to build a game that I would continue to publish every day, indefinitely. But as I went through the daily challenges of Enigmarch, it clicked that I was onto something fun. The clue-writing was satisfying in a way that felt different from crosswords. So when Engimarch ended, I kept going, and Raddle was born.
365 puzzles later, I'm still going! Over the past year, Raddle has had over 50 themes — from my favorite musical acts to a holiday party murder mystery to Paul Ruddle to celebrating Wingspan birds. In December, guest Raddlers stepped in to share things they loved from 2025. I've continued to tweak the site, and started to build out internal tools to help me track stats and construct Raddles more efficiently.
The best part is all the lovely notes I get from the folks who love the game. Like this:
Each letter makes my heart grow. Thanks to everyone for playing. Here's to many, many more!
-Sandy
Latest Puzzler
Every month I post a new bite-sized puzzle. Here's the latest one:
Think of two actors who co-starred in a trilogy of movies together. A homophone of one of their last names and an anagram of the other are the first names of two famous brothers. Who are they?
Submit your answer here 🗳MrBeast's $1 Million Puzzle Hunt
During this year's Super Bowl, Jimmy Donaldson (who you likely know as MrBeast) announced a puzzle hunt in collaboration with Salesforce. The ad itself was chock full of clues. The puzzle hunt, written by our friends at Lone Shark Games, promises $1 million to the first solver.
It's been a few weeks and the hunt is still going, and as you can see from this crowd-sourced write-up, the scope of this thing is wild. But it's not over yet! Read up and dive in:
Black Letter Labs
Many years ago, when I was just getting into puzzles, I participated in a hunt by Black Letter Labs about a musical act called The Red Herrings. Every puzzle was made up of gorgeous physical components like a stack of concert tickets, a set of keys, and a vinyl record. After it was done, I kept waiting for their next project, but no project ever came. Until now! BLL is back, with a landing page that is, per their style, very opaque about what you're buying into. Head over to sign up, and to track down the hidden puzzle on their site. One word of warning: while I trust their abilities to make a solid set of puzzles, I'm not too fond of what looks like the AI-generated art on their website.
Paper Airplane Magazine: 100% Human Stuff!
Paper Airplane Magazine is an independent publication that features wordplay, artwork, puzzles, and other novelties. Get the debut issue for free, featuring a map-based puzzle by yours truly, and then subscribe for the next four issues. Donations for the first issue raised $10,806.45 for USCRI, a non-profit dedicated to supporting the health and human rights of refugees and immigrants.
Enclose
Enclose.horse is a simple puzzle game about enclosing the maximum area with a limited number of walls. It's not hard to solve the puzzle, but it's trickier than I thought to do it in the most efficient manner.
0PLAYER - A Playable Game
This unique rule-discovery puzzle won Most Innovative Game at the 2025 Thinky Awards. While the mechanics are similar to other puzzles in video game format, 0PLAYER is designed to be noninteractive. According to Thinky, it is "about an opaque system of tiles, lines and hearts in an abstract environment. The entire game is a single large, static image file, best played in any kind of image editing software."
Raddle Mystery #6
The Mystery League
Raddle Mystery Theme #6 is finishing up tomorrow, though the submission form will be open through this weekend. As of this writing, we have ~110 solves. Can you crack it? Stay tuned to future Raddle themes by signing up for the Raddle daily newsletter.
Solution to the January Puzzler
I took a flight between two cities in continental Europe. I noticed that my boarding pass showed my departure and arrival city names as normal, but also — unexpectedly — it showed the name of my arrival country in all-caps letters. Which two cities was I traveling between?