Why a daily puzzle becomes a shared ritual, not just a game

The daily puzzle is not an invention of the smartphone. For most of the twentieth century, the crossword, the chess problem and later the number puzzle arrived with the morning paper, one per day, the same for every reader. Commuters worked on them in the same carriages, colleagues compared notes at lunch, and the solution appeared the next day for everyone at once. The history of how those puzzles became fixtures is in why crosswords, jigsaws and sliding puzzles endure.

What the web added was reach and a way to share the result without handing over the paper. What it took away, for a while, was the scarcity: an app could offer thousands of puzzles, and many did. The recent return of the one-a-day format suggests that the limit was never a shortcoming of print. It was part of the appeal.

What makes a daily puzzle different from an endless supply of levels is scarcity with synchrony: there is one, it is the same for everyone, and it is gone tomorrow. That turns a private activity into a common reference point. When you mention today’s puzzle, the other person knows exactly which one you mean.

Erica Boothby, Margaret Clark and John Bargh showed how much simultaneity alone can change an experience. In two lab studies, people tasted chocolate either at the same time as another participant or while the other person did something else, without talking. Pleasant chocolate was rated more likeable and flavourful when the tasting was shared; bitter chocolate was rated less likeable. Sharing did not simply make things nicer; it made them more intense.

Garriy Shteynberg has argued that this reflects a broader phenomenon he calls shared attention: knowing that others are attending to the same thing as you, even without being physically present, changes how you remember, judge and feel about it. He notes that mass media have made shared attention possible at a distance. A daily puzzle is a very small mass medium.

Sources1Source 1Boothby, E. J., Clark, M. S., & Bargh, J. A. (2014). Shared experiences are amplified. Psychological Science, 25(12), 2209–2216.2Source 2Shteynberg, G. (2015). Shared attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 579–590.

A habit is something you do automatically. A ritual is a fixed sequence of actions that carries meaning beyond what the actions achieve. Coffee, then the puzzle, then the share; always before checking email; always with the same friend. Nicholas Hobson and colleagues reviewed the psychology of ritual across social psychology, anthropology and neuroscience and proposed that rituals do three main jobs: they help regulate emotions, they help people get into a state ready to perform, and they help build and signal social connection.

Rituals also seem to change how much we enjoy the thing they lead up to. Kathleen Vohs and colleagues found in four experiments that people who performed a short ritual before eating chocolate or drinking lemonade enjoyed it more and savoured it longer than those who did not, and that it mattered that they performed the ritual themselves rather than watching someone else do it. The authors’ explanation is involvement: a ritual draws you into the experience.

This is also why a daily puzzle should never feel like a debt. Our earlier piece on daily rituals that do not demand you makes the case for designing daily play as an invitation rather than a streak that punishes a missed day. A ritual that you are afraid to break has stopped being a ritual and become an obligation.

Sources3Source 3Hobson, N. M., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Xygalatas, D., & Inzlicht, M. (2018). The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260–284.4Source 4Vohs, K. D., Wang, Y., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2013). Rituals enhance consumption. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1714–1721.

Bernard Rimé spent decades studying what people do after an emotional experience, and the answer is remarkably consistent across cultures: they talk about it. His review describes the social sharing of emotion as the normal response to most emotional episodes, large or small, and shows that sharing does social work. It brings listeners closer, spreads news and builds a common understanding of events.

Finishing a puzzle is a small emotion, a flash of relief or pride, or the frustration of a near miss. The shared result is a way of doing what people have always done with a feeling: passing it on. The best daily games make this easy while protecting the thing that makes it fun, the puzzle itself. A grid of coloured squares says how it went without saying how to do it.

The shared result also works as a low-cost way of keeping in touch. A friend who would not send a message just to say hello will happily send a score, and the reply, a score of their own or a single word of sympathy, keeps a thread alive that might otherwise go quiet for months. Many players surveyed during the pandemic lockdowns described games as a way of keeping in touch, which we explore in how games kept people connected.

Sources5Source 5Rimé, B. (2009). Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review. Emotion Review, 1(1), 60–85.

Put the research together and a picture of a good daily puzzle emerges. It is the same for everyone. It is short enough to fit into a morning. It gives a result that can be shared without spoiling the solution. And it does not punish anyone for missing a day.

Our daily board tries to meet that bar. Everyone gets the same sliding-brick board on the same UTC day, picked from boards a solver has already cleared. A clear earns one star, clearing within the solver’s move target earns two, and doing that without an undo earns three. Share from the clear card and your friend gets a link to the same board with your stars on it, not your moves. There is no clock, and tomorrow there is a new one whether you played today or not.

• One puzzle, the same for everyone, so it becomes a common reference point.
• Short enough to fit a routine, with a clear finish.
• A shareable result that shows how it went but not how to solve it.
• No penalty for missing a day, so the ritual stays voluntary.

Sources3Source 3Hobson, N. M., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Xygalatas, D., & Inzlicht, M. (2018). The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260–284.2Source 2Shteynberg, G. (2015). Shared attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 579–590.