Puzzle of the week on your website
A puzzle of the week is one playable board on a page you own, replaced by a fresh one on a schedule you keep. The URL never changes. The board does. Visitors learn the rhythm and come back for it — that is the whole product.
This is the online sibling of the newsletter puzzle corner: same job, different medium. And it runs on the current Puzzle Maker Pro path, not a future app — two routes onto your page, on two different licenses. Interactive editions are the per-module web play unlock: the module publishes its puzzles as a playable catalog, and the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin puts the board on your page. Self-hosting the player instead runs on the exported puzzle JSON files, and that Customer JSON export is a Productivity feature — part of the Productivity edition on every module, not something Interactive grants. Buy for the route you will actually run. What an embed is and who it is for is the category page; the upload steps live in Publish a Puzzle Catalog. This page is only about keeping the board fresh.
Retention is the job
A one-off embed earns a visit. A corner with a rhythm earns return visits. That is a different economics: the visitor who knows a new board lands every Monday has a reason to type your URL again without a newsletter, an ad, or an algorithm in between.
Print periodicals have run this play for a century — readers who skim the articles still look for the puzzle, and once the corner exists, it has to exist every issue. The web version is stronger in one way: the reader does not need the next issue delivered. The page is already bookmarked. Your only obligation is that the board actually changes when you said it would. A “weekly puzzle” page showing the same board for six weeks reads as a dead site, and does more damage than no corner at all.
So pick the cadence you can keep. Weekly is the classic. Monthly is honest and still works. The cadence you cannot keep is the only wrong answer.
One saved project, regenerated on your cadence
The setup happens once. Pick the puzzle type, the size, the difficulty band, the styling that matches your site. Save the project. From then on, each cycle is the same short pass: open the saved project, generate a fresh board, export the playable catalog, upload the new zip to the same catalog post. The plugin replaces the old files on upload — same page, same shortcode, same URL, new puzzle. If you self-host, the move is the same shape but the whole batch moves: replace the complete exported batch folder at the existing path — the catalog file, the per-puzzle JSON files, and whatever assets and bootstrap files the export includes. The catalog only lists references; each board lives in its own file. Overwrite the catalog alone and the page keeps serving last week’s puzzles, or points at files that are not there.
Note what is doing the scheduling in that loop: you. There is no queue of future boards, no publish-on-Monday timer, no automation to configure. The cadence is your own publishing workflow, exactly like a weekly blog post — the software’s job is that the regenerate-and-export pass takes minutes, so the habit survives. If a five-minute Monday task is not going to happen at your desk, run monthly, or generate a quarter’s worth of boards in one sitting and upload them one cycle at a time from that folder.
The settings carry, so week 30 looks exactly like week 3. Same footprint, same style, new content. That consistency is what makes the corner read as a fixture of your site instead of a widget you tried once.
The corner replaces; it does not accumulate
A published catalog defaults to a menu of its boards. That is the right shape for an archive or a practice page, and the wrong shape for a corner. The corner’s pull is that this week’s board is this week’s — one fresh puzzle, current, then gone. Keep the set small: this week’s board, or an easy/hard pair of it. When you upload next week’s zip, last week’s board leaves.
If letting old boards vanish feels wasteful, it is not — they are still yours. Fold them into a printable pack, a bonus PDF for subscribers, or a second, separate archive page. But do not make the corner carry the archive. A fifty-board menu has no reason to be visited this week.
The page around the board stays yours the whole time: your nav, your email form, your links. That furniture never changes on upload — only the puzzle does. If the corner should also capture addresses or land on a buy button, that is the funnel design, already written: Playable puzzle lead magnet. The magnet is capture; the corner is retention. The strongest setup is both: the corner brings them back, the form beside it catches them.
Which puzzle carries a corner
Interactive is bought per module, and web play is live on newest modules — not on every module in the shop, so check the product page for the type you want. Live examples with their own pages: word search on WordPress, playable Ikura, playable Killer Sudoku. Where an embeddable puzzle sits next to your print products is the four-channel map.
Same rule as the print corner: pick one type and keep it. A corner that is Killer Sudoku every Monday builds a habit; a corner that changes type randomly builds nothing. A word-list module adds one editorial option the number puzzles do not have — the week’s list can track your content, your season, your niche — at the cost of writing a list each cycle. The number and logic types regenerate with no editorial input at all, which is what most corners need to survive a year.
What this is not
- Not a scheduling feature. No daily mode, no streak counters, no level-path campaigns, no auto-publish calendar. Habit-loop mechanics like those belong to a future Games & Learning program and are not part of what you buy today. The corner works because you publish on a rhythm, not because the software does.
- Not PuzzleWire. PuzzleWire is a future play-only SaaS and is not in current bundles. The puzzle-of-the-week corner runs entirely on the live path: the plugin’s playable catalog on WordPress, or the Customer JSON batch on your own server — files on your own site either way.
- Not an LMS or a player dashboard. Progress is local to each visitor’s browser. Nothing comes back per person.
- Not the lead magnet and not the archive. Those are the other two page shapes, linked above. One page, one job.
When it is worth doing
You have a site with visitors you want back — a niche blog, a community site, a shop with a print puzzle line beside it. One saved project, one page, one slot in your week. Commercial rights for puzzles on your own site are part of the Puzzle Maker Pro license as stated on the homepage. The board refreshes, the URL holds, and the corner becomes the cheapest recurring reason anyone has to visit you on purpose. That is the puzzle of the week.