The hardeasy part.

The New York Times ships one small puzzle a day—a 4×4 board, a single solution, built by a brilliant constructor. Wyna Liu spends two and a half hours on each Connections board and says it never gets easier. This is slow and unscalable, but they don’t care. They monetize subscriptions and engagement, not the games directly. They only need 365 levels a year.

A mobile studio has different needs. Players expect a tap experience with larger boards, layered mechanics, and enough levels to retain them for months. That means 8 to 15 categories per board, thousands of levels, real monetization. If Wyna Liu needs two and a half hours for a satisfying 4×4, how long does a 10×5 take? A 15×5? And how much longer to validate that every row is clean?

The puzzlemaking team uses up easier topics. Puzzles need to be internally mutually exclusive—no overlapping answers across categories. Cross-checking every word against every other category is computationally hard. LLMs can’t sustain it: they collapse toward the same popular topics and can’t maintain consistency across levels. Your highest-LTV players notice the repetition first. They stop playing. That’s revenue left on the table.

The genre lives or dies on its content. Let’s look deeper at why scaling is so hard:

The grid is a system, not a list of rows.

A word association puzzle isn’t a collection of independent topics. It’s a system where every word has tendrils reaching into every other row. “Pearls” belongs in “strung together” until “pearl-clutching” is three rows down. “Conduct” is fine in “handle oneself” until “chivalry” shows up in another row. “Cycles” sits comfortably in “strung together” until the player notices “washer and dryer.” Each word’s clarity depends on the entire rest of the grid.

For a puzzle with M rows and N columns, every word needs to be cross-referenced against M−1 other topics. That’s M × N × (M−1) checks.

Most cross-references are obviously fine. But the dangerous ones hide among the safe ones, and a human working row by row can’t hold the full grid in their head. They work locally and hope. Players find what they miss.

LLMs explore a narrow slice of conceptual space.

Humans and LLMs both need to be primed before they brainstorm well — pointed toward castle fortifications, tropical weather, downhill sports, robotics, sanitization. Without that direction, they circle the same familiar territory. And when LLMs generate the words within a topic, they collapse toward the most statistically common associations. Ask for “castle fortifications” and you get moat, drawbridge, rampart every time. They don’t find the words that make a category click — the ones that make a player pause, see the connection, and feel clever. LLMs are better at evaluating puzzles than generating them, and when left to generate on their own, they produce levels that feel flat.

Studios that push further — forcing diversity through seed domains, or mapping every word in a vocabulary to its possible groups — get further, but still produce raw material, not finished puzzles. Sense separation, mutual exclusivity checking, cross-level deduplication, difficulty calibration, and content filtering are each a separate engineering problem on top of the raw data. Read more ›

The data spans two types of semantic relationships, and both matter for gameplay. Categorical associations have an obvious shared trait — the category “soft” gives you gentle, fuzzy, velvet, and the player sees the connection quickly. Associative relationships require the player to decipher the common theme — seeing bunny, soft, fuzzy, and rodent together and realizing they all evoke the same thing. Each serves a different kind of thinking — one rewards sorting, the other rewards lateral leaps. Designers can mix both within a level to vary how it feels, or lean on one type to control difficulty.

The result is puzzles with diverse topics, airtight categories, and interesting words — the three things that make players feel smart, and come back to solve more levels. That’s what separates a game people play for a week from a game people play for a year.