Newsroom Puzzles: Free Puzzles for Publishers, and What’s Next

Newsroom Puzzles: Free Puzzles for Publishers, and What's Next

Newsroom Puzzles is the publisher-facing side of 10k Game Studio: casual puzzle widgets that a small or regional newspaper can drop onto a page with one script tag. It's free, there's no signup, and readers never leave the publisher's own domain.

This is where things stand today and where we're heading.

The idea

Most small publishers either have no games at all or send readers off to a big third-party games hub. We wanted the opposite: a light, fast widget that sits on a 404 page, a games section or a sidebar, and keeps the audience on the site.

<script src="https://newsroompuzzles.com/embed.js?site=yourpaper.com&game=sudoku"></script>

The widget is plain JavaScript in a Shadow DOM, with no images, so it stays tiny and doesn't fight the host page's styling. Publishers can switch between light and dark themes and pick an accent colour, and there's a private stats page per site (installs, plays, wins, losses). It collects no cookies and no personal data.

Live today

Eleven free games are built and shipped in the embed:

• Sudoku and Akari (the Nikoli-style "Light Up" logic puzzle, which most papers don't already carry)
• Word Search, with themed packs: general, sports, seasonal, newsroom, crypto, Japan and yōkai
• Hangman, sharing the same word packs
• Memory
• 2048
• Mini Crossword (5×5, from a curated puzzle bank)
• KenKen (generated 4×4 cage arithmetic)
• Codeword
• Fill-ins
• Hexadice, a mod-6 lights-out puzzle

The marketing site has been redesigned, and it has setup guides for getting started, WordPress and custom 404 pages. 16 publisher sites have already moved over from our earlier games project.

Coming up

Free track

• Outreach to a handful of regional papers, so we can learn what publishers actually want.
• More install guides (theming, reading your stats, what Akari is).
• Testing the embed on real WordPress and non-WordPress 404 templates.
• A staging environment, so bigger widget changes never hit live publisher pages untested.
• A full daily crossword is on the list, but it needs a clue and answer dataset first.

Richer, engine-built games (paid tier, still at the planning stage)
Some games need real art and animation, so they're built in Defold and exported for the web rather than done in CSS. The order we're planning:

1. Mahjong Solitaire
2. Jigsaw
3. Block Puzzle
4. Solitaire, as modes of one template (Klondike, Spider, FreeCell and more)

Match-3, Bubble Shooter and Trivia follow, using art kits we already own. We're skipping casino and arcade games on purpose: they don't fit a newspaper page.

We haven't decided how the paid tier works yet (accounts, billing, pricing). We'll design that when a publisher actually asks to pay for it.

Are you a publisher?

If you run a small or regional site and want a puzzle on your pages, have a look at newsroompuzzles.com. And if there's a game your readers keep asking for, tell us in the comments.

Thanks for reading,
Newsroom Puzzles, a 10k Game Studio project