While I love Puzzmo and the games that it offers, I find the chess game mode really frustrating. I understand the idea behind it, and I think it has potential. But as someone who doesn’t play chess very often, I can’t honestly say it’s fun to throw myself at the two daily chess games against a relatively unforgiving AI, especially when the game plays nothing like actual chess. It’s especially frustrating when you finish every other game, only to be left with chess to finish the page.Again, I don’t entirely dislike the concept of the game, but I think the game would seriously benefit from some sort of difficulty setting at the expense of points. I think being able to lower the elo of your opponent would make the game much more fun, and finishing a page would actually feel enjoyable, rather than a test of patience after finishing the rest of the games.

EDIT: I don’t know if this is a common bug or a random glitch or what but this makes two separate days where I don’t have access to the app I PAID FOR. Not a single game loads when I try to play it and I can’t even access the settings or try to send feedback a different way. If this was free to play it would be annoying but bearable I guess, but I’m paying for access to these puzzles and I’ve been locked out of doing so for multiple days which is just wasting money. Get your app together, this is unacceptable!The puzzles are good fun and most of them are challenging enough to get you to actually THINK, though after playing a bunch of the crosswords I’ve noticed the same few words tossed in literally dozens of times. Doesn’t ruin the whole crossword but it is a bit annoying.The price for full access is cheap enough I find it worth it, but man is this app buggy. The UI is already awkward to use and at times straight up just unreliable, and then seemingly at random the app just decides to stop working for me or glitches out and I have to close it and relaunch. If this happened once in a while it wouldn’t be so bad but it’s like every other day for me and as a paid app that’s really disappointing.

Originally, I got this because I thought it was a free version of most of the NYT games. I even enjoyed it more than the NYT games at one point because I thought that the games would be consistently free (especially because there are quite a few ads). Recently I hit my “game cap” which means all games are restricted besides the crosswords. If I wanted to just play crosswords I’d get an app just for crosswords… that are free.. and honestly have better clues. I understand we’re in an economic downturn and all but it’s wild to me the greed of some companies. Why would I pay every single month for a game I could play for free somewhere else? Or why wouldn’t I just pay a one time fee for an all access puzzle game? That this app advertises itself as a free version of the NYT games is crazy to me because in actuality they just want to hook you so you end up paying the subscription fee anyway. While they reuse and likely use ai to generate puzzles. Save your money, honestly maybe just subscribe to your local newspaper for daily crosswords. Fun game but ultimately not worth the subscription fee.

The puzzles are high quality and the app itself functions perfectly fine—as it should, considering it’s just a wrapper for the mobile site. It’s a bit disappointing that there are no app-specific UI adjustments (many buttons are too small, the quick access menu for the different games is all the way at the bottom of the page) and that the app is iOS-exclusive despite, again, just being the mobile site that you can already access on any device. Also, tapping the next arrow when playing the crossword should cycle through the clues in numerical order, not jump to the clue directly below when filling across or to the right when filling down.