About Puzzle Cottage

What Puzzle Cottage is

Puzzle Cottage is a daily-puzzle website featuring 11 free brain games — including a free Wordle alternative, a free Sudoku, a free Connections-style word grouping puzzle, daily trivia, anagram races, mini crossword, and more. Every past daily puzzle stays free in the archive forever — not paywalled.

Beyond the games, the site publishes:

• 12 strategy guides at /tips/ — in-depth, technique-focused, with worked examples
• 40 word-list pages at /word-lists/ — the ENABLE dictionary exposed by length, starting letter, and rare-letter filters
• Printable puzzle worksheets at /printables/ — PDF-ready Sudoku and anagram pages, free to print or save
• Editorial / research articles — do brain games actually work?, the history of Sudoku, the history of Wordle, the math behind Sudoku, Wordle statistics
• Open data at /data/ — the ENABLE word list as downloadable JSON for developers and researchers
• Interactive tools at /tools/ — Wordle starter ranker, anagram explorer, free typing speed test, letter-frequency visualizer, Sudoku difficulty rater
• Embeddable game widgets at /embed/ — iframe-friendly versions of Word Scramble, Sudoku, and Anagram Race for bloggers

Editorial process

Every page on Puzzle Cottage follows the same standards:

For game guides and strategy content

• Tested by playing the actual game. Every strategy claim in our tips pages comes from playing the daily puzzle — usually for weeks — before publishing. The Sudoku techniques in tips/sudoku.html are the techniques we actually use to clear our own daily Hard puzzles.
• Worked examples, not hand-waving. When a guide says "use a hidden single," there's a worked grid showing the deduction. When the Wordle starter ranker says SALET wins by 0.04 bits, the math is shown.
• Published with a real updated-on date. Every guide has a dateModified in its schema and the date is shown to readers. Stale content is rewritten or removed.

For research and editorial content

• Peer-reviewed sources. Claims about cognitive science cite specific studies: NEJM (Verghese 2003), PROTECT (Lancet Psychiatry 2019), ACTIVE (JAMA 2017), Wilson (2013).
• Honest about evidence quality. Where studies are observational rather than randomized, we say so. Where evidence is mixed, we say so. We don't make brain-training claims the FTC would consider deceptive.
• The 2016 Lumosity ruling is on every relevant page. Brain-training apps were fined $2 million for over-claiming benefits. We cite that ruling so readers can calibrate their expectations.

For programmatic content (word lists, printables)

• Generated from a single audited source. Our word lists come from dictionary.js, a curated subset of the public-domain ENABLE word list. The same dictionary validates words in all our games. There is no inconsistency between what one page says is a valid word and what the games accept.
• Generators are versioned. Each page indicates when it was last regenerated. The generator scripts live in the source repo (scripts/) and are reproducible.

Data sources

Several public-domain or Creative Commons resources back the site:

• ENABLE word list — the dictionary used to validate words in every word game. ~80,000 words, public domain, downloadable at /data/enable-word-list.json.
• Cognitive science research — we cite NEJM, ACTIVE (JAMA), PROTECT (Lancet Psychiatry), and the Devanand 2024 Cochrane review when discussing brain-game effects. Every citation includes the year and journal.
• 3Blue1Brown / Sanderson Wordle analysis — for the optimal-opener calculations on tips/scramble.html and tools/wordle-starter-ranker.html.
• Public-domain history sources — for the Wordle and Sudoku history pieces, we cite primary sources (newspaper archives, NYT acquisition press releases) where possible.

How Puzzle Cottage is funded

Three revenue sources, in order of importance:

1. Display advertising — Google AdSense (publisher ID ca-pub-4188229364684718). Ads appear in the page margins around the gameplay area. No ads inside the puzzle area itself — no popups, no auto-play video, no interstitials between rounds. This is a deliberate editorial choice.
2. Affiliate links — we may include affiliate links to relevant products (e.g., puzzle books) in editorial content. When we do, we'll mark the links clearly. Currently no affiliate links are active.
3. Donations — not currently accepted. We considered Patreon-style support but decided that the friction outweighed the revenue at our current scale.

What Puzzle Cottage does not do:

• Sell or share user data. We don't have user accounts to begin with.
• Run paid SEO content. No "sponsored content" pretending to be editorial.
• Run a paywall on past puzzles. The archive is free forever — that's the central value proposition.
• Take VC funding or accept investors. Bootstrapped from day one.

What we won’t build

Specific things we've decided not to add:

• Wordle / Sudoku solvers. Tools that take your guesses and reveal the answer remove the entire point of the puzzle. Our tools page calls this out explicitly.
• Cheat tools for any game. Same logic.
• Mass auto-generated content. Some categories of programmatic SEO content (e.g., "5-letter words starting with A" pages) are useful as reference. We don't auto-generate filler articles.
• Trackers and fingerprinting. The site uses Google Analytics 4 (GDPR-gated, only with consent). We don't use third-party trackers, fingerprinting libraries, or behavioral-data brokers.
• Daily-answer / hint pages. Mashable, NYT, and the Verge own this lane. We don't compete on it; we focus on strategy, history, and tools.

Privacy and data handling

Brief version:

• No accounts. Streaks save in your browser's localStorage. We don't know who you are.
• Email only if you actively subscribe via the optional email-capture modal (Kit / ConvertKit, GDPR-compliant double opt-in). Used for occasional newsletter, never sold.
• Google Analytics 4 only with consent via the cookie banner. Decline and no GA loads at all.
• Ads via Google AdSense — standard contextual targeting, no personally-identifying data sold to AdSense.

Full details on the privacy policy page.

Accuracy and corrections

If you find an error in our content — a strategy guide that's wrong, a fact in a research piece that's miscited, a generated word list that includes something it shouldn't — please let us know. We'll fix it and credit the find if you'd like attribution.

Accessibility

The site is built with semantic HTML, follows WCAG-AA contrast ratios, supports keyboard navigation in games, and uses browser-native zoom for users who need larger text. Built-in large-print mode is on the roadmap. If you encounter an accessibility barrier, contact us and we'll prioritize the fix.

Related

• Privacy policy
• Terms of service
• Site FAQ
• Full sitemap
• Do brain games actually work? — the research