Maybe you’ve noticed it too. Everyone seems to have become fixated on puzzle games. In the morning, over coffee, I play Word Wheel on the Guardian app. Over lunch, colleagues compare notes on Tradle, the game where you guess a country from its exports. Which place exports about 45% fish and 50% crustaceans? Greenland. Another friend can’t fall asleep without her nightly Sudoku ritual.
The online puzzle craze took off during the Covid pandemic, and it shows no sign of slowing down. New York Times subscribers now spend more time playing puzzles on the app than reading the news. Sales of quiz books hit a record last year, up 24% from 2024.
Puzzle games aren’t new, nor are puzzle crazes. The first use of the steam-powered printing press in 1814 made newspapers a mass phenomenon, and editors quickly discovered that puzzles were a sure-fire way to keep readers hooked. By 1925, the Chicago Department of Health reported that the US was in the grip of “crossworditis” thanks to the puzzles’ irresistible “mental kick”.
Modern neuroscience agrees: completing a puzzle releases positive neurotransmitters in the brain, most notably dopamine.
But if games are booming today, there may be more to the phenomenon than the pleasure of a series of small eureka moments. Perhaps they are fulfilling a more profound need, and the more the world puzzles us, the more we long to solve puzzles.
At a moment when our attention feels constantly under siege, these circuit breakers allow for a moment of peace of mind.
Social media raises anxiety levels and scatters our attention, studies have repeatedly shown. Puzzles offer an escape from the skittish experience of constantly jumping from one rabbit hole to the next. Instead of Instagram-induced Fomo or doomscrolling the news, we focus on a single problem. We do not even have to let go of the haptic reassurance of holding our phone.
Moreover, these games offer a form of productive rumination. An Italian friend plays Wordle primarily to expand his English vocabulary. Another sees puzzle games as a form of “resistance to a world that’s killing our brains”. When he said this at dinner with a group edging towards their 40s, several people confessed that they felt their mental sharpness slipping, with social media and AI to blame.
In that sense, the rise of puzzles may mirror the rise of recreational sport in the 19th and 20th centuries. As physical labour declined, people began exercising more intentionally to keep in shape. If AI increasingly handles our cognitive labour, and social media overloads our attention, puzzles may become the mental gym that keeps our brains in shape.
Indeed, research suggests that puzzle games stimulate neuroplasticity, helping the brain form new connections and enhancing memory, focus and creative thinking. And, like real sports, they can be social. Players often share results and debate strategies.
Puzzles also reflect the culture and era that produced them. The famous illustrator Tomi Ungerer from Alsace said he only did English and French crosswords, as German ones were “never fun”. Perhaps. The first English language crossword, published in 1913, began with the word “fun”. The first German Kreuzworträtsel, published in 1925, asked: “Germany’s pressing obligation?” The answer: “Reparations.”
But perhaps the current puzzles boom is not only because of their escapist appeal and the sporty version of overthinking, but also their utopian quality. They offer a small, contained alternative universe contrasting sharply with the anarchy and ambiguity of real life.
I have an early memory of my grandmother leaning over the crossword of her Swiss local newspaper, La Liberté, pencil sharpened, humming loudly as she filled in the blanks. When she did this, we kids knew that she was unavailable, temporarily gone to a parallel universe. The practice seemed to soothe her, offering refuge from ennui and busy family life. We are arguably even more in need of such solace in the 21st century.
The US president openly uses his office in ways that benefit businesses he has set up. In the arena of foreign policy, he declares that his own morality is the only restriction on his actions. But in the puzzle universe, there is still something like the rule of law and meritocracy operating. You can’t succeed by being brutal or bluffing. There are no alternative facts. A wrong letter is simply wrong; a correct solution is clearly right.
You also can’t simply luck your way to puzzle success, like your former classmate turned bitcoin bro who is now partying in Saint Kitts and Nevis. Puzzles reward effort, thought and accumulated knowledge, and the feedback is immediate. In adult life, we often operate in the unknown. At work, at home, we rarely know if we are doing it right – until it is too late. A puzzle, by contrast, tells us immediately where we stand.
Next to the reassuring sense of certainty of right and wrong we experienced at school, puzzle games also provide something else that is increasingly rare: closure.
Much of life feels like an accumulation of loose ends. Have you saved enough? Been a good enough friend? Crosswords have final clues, books have final chapters, but the LinkedIn feed goes on for ever. The Swiss author Nina Kunz writes: “In the present day, nothing ever ends … That makes me nervous. Because I like conclusions and neatly wrapped-up endings. I need full stops and final sentences to be able to understand what’s going on.”
Puzzles, however, can be completed. What satisfaction it is to fill in the final square or find the final word. Puzzles may be our new utopia – a well-arranged world where rules are clear, problems are solvable and effort is rewarded. In a confusing age, that soft space on your phone is hard to resist.
For a few minutes, we get to live in a fair, orderly world. And for those few minutes, at least, we get to reassure ourselves that our brains can still deduce, recognise patterns and engage in linguistic play. We are thus reminded that we are still capable of comprehending the world – if only the world would let us.
