As you no doubt saw across all our social media yesterday, PuzzleNation is celebrating ten years of delivering quality puzzles to solvers.
Given this marvelous milestone, I thought I would take you on a brief trip through the history of PuzzleNation.
It all started with a website. PuzzleNation.com. A place to sign up, solve puzzles, and engage socially with fellow puzzlers in both forums and head-to-head puzzle-solving.
But that nearly wasn’t our name. No, in the early days, there was the suggestion that we call our site Puzzle Beach, but that got nixed fairly quickly. After all, you can really only enjoy the beach at certain times of the year, whereas you’re welcome to visit PuzzleNation and enjoy puzzles whenever you like!
As the cover image for our Decade of PuzzleNation Puzzle Packet, I made a timeline chronicling the history of PN through our various puzzles, and the first few images are from PuzzleNation.com puzzles.
It started with a handful of puzzle types to solve. There were some favorites from our friends at Penny Dell Puzzles like Tanglewords and StarSpell, along with classics like crosswords, Sudoku, and word searches.
I started working for PuzzleNation as the volunteer forum manager for the site. I answered questions, offered solving advice, posted conversation starters, and hosted contests for site users.
But even then, we knew our future rested in the pockets of millions of solvers: puzzle apps.
By the time we launched PuzzleNation Blog, our Penny Dell Crossword App was already available for iPad and iPhone.
Fred, our Director of Digital Games, joined us not long after, and has been deftly steering the ship ever since.
We soon followed with iBooks for Classic Word Search and downloadable puzzle collections called Penny Dell Jumbo Crosswords. The green, blue, and red icons should be quite familiar to our long-time app users.
In 2014, we expanded our iPad puzzle app library to include Classic Sudoku and Classic Word Search, as well as launching an update to Penny Dell Crosswords, our flagship app. The next year, Penny Dell Crosswords came to Android by popular demand.
We relaunched a much improved Penny Dell Sudoku for all platforms the following year, and in 2017, we launched the first in our Daily POP series, Daily POP Crosswords. Focusing on themed days and the freshest puzzle themes and cluing, Daily POP Crosswords launched us to the next level in puzzle apps.
Along the way, our programming team has gone from strength to strength, and the addition of insightful puzzlers, both behind the scenes and in the ranks of our contributing constructors, have made our puzzles better than ever.
Our most recent app launch was Daily POP Word Search, and as for what’s on the horizon… well, all I can say for now is that we have some very exciting projects in the works. Be sure to watch this space.
And, as you might expect, as our brand evolved and grew, so did my duties at PuzzleNation. Soon I was social media manager for the forums… and then occasional blogger for PuzzleNation Blog… and then social media manager for the whole brand… and then lead blogger for PuzzleNation Blog as well.
It’s been an amazing journey, and we’re so grateful to have you, our fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers, along for the ride. Thank you for your enthusiasm, your support, and your puzzly spirit.
For anyone who would still like to participate in our Decade of PuzzleNation Celebration and receive a free downloadable puzzle packet, there are a few ways you can do so:
- Like us on Facebook and share our anniversary post there
- Follow us on Twitter and share our anniversary post there
- Join us here on the blog and share this post to either Facebook or Twitter
You only need to do one of those things! Once we’ve seen your shared post, we’ll contact you with the special code to download our anniversary puzzle packet by clicking the link below!
[Special super-secret PN Anniversary Packet link]
Thank you so much for supporting PuzzleNation and celebrating a decade of terrific puzzles with us. Happy puzzling, solvers!
PuzzleNation.com Blog 