A playable puzzle lead magnet is a free board a visitor solves in the browser, on the page where you sell the print thing — the KDP title, the Etsy pack, the membership. Play is the bait, the email form is the ask, the book is the sale. This page is that funnel design: which puzzle to give away, how much of it, and where the form and the buy button sit.
What an embed is and who it is for is already written: Interactive puzzle embed is the category page. This one assumes you want the embed to earn addresses and sales, not just exist.
The path is current output, not a future app. Newest Puzzle Maker Pro modules generate playable JSON / HTML; the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin — or a player you host yourself — puts it on your page. Interactive editions are the per-module license. PuzzleWire, if the name comes up, is a future play-only SaaS and is not this funnel.
Why a board beats a sample PDF
The standard lead magnet trade is backwards for puzzles. A free-chapter PDF asks for the address first and delivers value second — and a downloaded sample proves nothing about a puzzle except that it prints. A playable board flips the order: the visitor gets real value in the first minute, on your domain, before you ask for anything. By the time they see the form, they have finished a puzzle you made and know exactly what the paid product feels like.
That order is the whole design:
Play happens in the embed. The sale happens in the page around it — and the sign-up can sit in either: a gate inside the player, or your own form beside it. Both are below.
Which puzzle to give away
The one you sell beside it. Same theme, same difficulty band, ideally the same word lists or number sets as the book, so the person who finishes a board recognizes the paid product as more of the thing they just enjoyed. A kids’ vocabulary title with an expert 40×40 teaser is a broken promise in both directions.
Two more filters:
- Finishable in minutes. A lead magnet board that takes an evening never reaches your form.
- Obviously a puzzle in five seconds. If the free board needs a how-to-play lesson, it is the wrong magnet — pick the type a stranger already knows.
Interactive is bought per module, so this choice is also the license choice: buy Interactive for the puzzle type you actually want playing on the sales page, not for the whole catalog.
Teaser, not archive
A published catalog shows a menu of its puzzles by default. That is the right shape for an archive or a practice page, and the wrong shape for a lead magnet — a fifty-board menu next to a buy button answers the question the book was supposed to answer.
The magnet is a teaser: a handful of boards, three to five, from the same well as the paid set. Enough to prove the product and start a habit; little enough that “there are two hundred more” is a real offer. The full set stays paid — the book, the printable pack, the members’ page.
Where the email capture sits
Two workable designs, and the player supports both.
Inside the player: the built-in email gate. A game-mode catalog — the leveled path from the Catalog Merge tool‘s Game options step — can lock every level past the first few behind an email sign-up. The visitor plays the free boards, taps a locked one, and the sign-up form opens right in the player; on success the whole path unlocks immediately. The address never stays in the browser: the WordPress plugin (1.2+) delivers it server-side to MailerLite or to any webhook (Zapier, Make, your own script), so it lands on your list, not in the embed. This is the purpose-built version of the funnel — play first, ask at the exact moment the visitor wants more. One boundary: the gate belongs to the game-mode-catalog-on-WordPress path. A menu-shaped catalog has no gate, and a self-hosted static player with no subscribe endpoint behind it fails open — the boards just stay free.
Around the player: your own form. If you skip the gate — or host outside WordPress — the capture is a normal form from your own email service, placed on the page around the board. Placements that work:
- Form directly under the board. “Want ten more like this? Get the printable pack” — the ask arrives at the moment of finished-puzzle goodwill.
- Gate the bonus, not the play. The boards stay free; the downloadable PDF of extra puzzles costs an address. Nobody feels tricked, and the download is trivial to deliver from any email tool.
- Form beside the board on the listing page. When the embed lives on the book’s own sales page, the capture is the consolation offer for the visitor who is not ready to buy today.
The finish and the buy button
Two buttons matter, and only one of them is built in.
Your own buy button is page furniture: the book cover, the price, the link to Amazon or your shop, placed wherever your theme puts it. That button works whether or not anyone plays.
The built-in one is the finish. The Catalog Merge tool has a Game options step that turns the catalog menu into a leveled path with a completion panel — your message, your button text, your URL — shown when the last board is solved. Besides the email gate, that panel is the only call-to-action the player itself hands the visitor, and it is the strongest slot on the page: the URL should be the book or the sign-up form, not your homepage. Everything else around the board is layout you already control.
The publishing steps — export, zip, shortcode — are in Publish a Puzzle Catalog. This page is only the funnel.
What this is not
This is not PuzzleWire. That is a future play-only SaaS, not in current bundles, and not how a lead magnet gets built today.
This is not an LMS or a per-player analytics feed. Progress is local to each visitor’s browser, and the play beacons carry no personal data. What a WordPress catalog does give you is aggregate counters — Plays, Signups, Finishes — right in the Puzzle Catalogs admin list: enough to see whether the magnet converts, never who played.
This is not the embed category page or an upload tutorial — those exist and are linked above.
When it is worth doing
You sell (or are about to sell) a puzzle title, you own a site, and you can spare a few boards from the set. Put the teaser on a page you control, your form under it, and point the finish at the offer. The visitor gets a real puzzle, you get a real address, and the book gets a buyer who already knows what is inside. That is the lead magnet.