Did you know that Wend, LinkedIn’s newest puzzle game, could have been one of the platform’s launch games? It’s true! However, instead of debuting on day one, it spent another year and a half being tested and perfected before it was rolled out. That made us wonder – how does LinkedIn decide a game is finally ready for primetime? So, we went straight to the source to find out!
Beebom recently attended the World Sudoku and Puzzle Championship in Kolkata, India, and we got the chance to sit down with LinkedIn’s Principal Puzzlemaster, Thomas Snyder. In our talk with Thomas Snyder, we asked how the team decides whether a new LinkedIn game is too hard or easy, and how they know it’s ready to be released. Here’s what he shared!
Think Like a Beginner, Not a Puzzle Pro
You might guess the process starts with a puzzle setter who loves a good brain-teaser. We thought the same! But Snyder said that’s exactly the trap. He explained:
“You have to first think about who is your audience.”
Enjoying a puzzle yourself doesn’t make it a good one, and solving it smoothly when you already know the intended path proves very little.
He said that his fix is to watch real people play. “Learning by watching others play these games, what kind of steps are more natural if they’ve never played it before? What are natural after they’ve played a game for 10 days, 20 days,” he exclaimed. A puzzle that feels perfect on day one can feel flat by day twenty, so the team needs to see both.
So where does the difficulty dial come from? Snyder’s advice:
“Don’t try to make a puzzle that will challenge you. Write a puzzle that someone who’s never solved a puzzle before would enjoy.”
So, while developing LinkedIn games, he wants his team to think like a 5-year-old, a 10-year-old, or someone brand new to the game.
That empathy for the solver, he said, is the key!
Testing, Tweaking, and Knowing When It’s Ready
Of course, a daily game can’t just be easy. It has to be polished. “If you’re going to run it all the time, you really want to polish those edges,” Snyder said, and testing is crucial to that.
Take Wend, for example. Before landing on the final version, the team tried three or four concepts that were close to each other. One big change was moving from a fully open grid to a shaded one, which gave solvers more starting points.
They also tried circling the starting letters, but that made Wend “a very different game” that didn’t challenge solvers the way the team wanted. Snyder summed up the whole approach in four steps:
“Iterate, trial, read the feedback, improve.”
So, when is a game actually done? There’s no single magic switch for that. “We felt close for many, many months, and then we knew when we had it,” Snyder said. One sign you’re near the top, he added, is when you make new examples and “they feel worse.” That’s your cue that the design has peaked.
There’s one more hurdle for games played by people worldwide. A word game has to make sense to solvers across different forms of English, so testers from LinkedIn’s offices around the globe play it, and AI helps check how words land in different regions. That is also the reason why LinkedIn has more logic puzzles than word games.
This is also why you won’t see a shiny new game every week. “We don’t want to just launch a thing and not know it’s going to actually be successful,” Snyder added. Games do launch steadily through the year, but only after they’ve survived all of the above.
So the next time you finish a LinkedIn puzzle in two minutes and feel like a genius, remember that there was a very long road behind that tidy little grid!
What’s Next for LinkedIn Games?
During our chat about how LinkedIn games get finalised, we had to ask the obvious question: is a new puzzle on the way? While Snyder kept the name under wraps, he shared that the next LinkedIn game will likely be another logic puzzle, but with an arithmetic twist.
Snyder was careful not to call it a math game, but he said the team is working in a space that may have you “thinking a little bit about how numbers come together.”
As for when it will land, there’s no launch date yet. Considering everything that a game goes through before release, a little patience is in order!
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