An independent magazine for the morning solver.

GameTipster started, like a lot of small publications, as a frustration. I’d spent eight years writing puzzle and game reviews for a national daily, watched the company get acquired, watched the games desk get folded into “Lifestyle,” and watched the reviews I’d filed get replaced with affiliate roundups generated by a content farm in another time zone. It seemed worth trying to keep at least one corner of the field staffed by humans who actually played the puzzles.

So in spring 2024 I wrote a manifesto on a personal blog and four people I respected wrote back to say they wanted in. Theo Ramsay had been freelancing crossword coverage for a trivia app. Priya Venkat was running a Substack about Wordle math. Cal Brennan was the engineer behind a small anagram solver I’d been using for years. Iris Okafor was writing the daily column for a midi-crossword newsletter that I read every morning. Within six weeks we had a masthead and a homepage. Within six months we had this.

i What this magazine is

An independent, advertising-light, opinion-led publication about the daily puzzles people actually play — word games, themed crosswords, clue puzzles, and the long tail of mobile word apps. We publish long-form reviews when a puzzle deserves one, strategy columns when there’s a method worth explaining, and a daily companion page for each game in our regular rotation so readers can check the day’s answer when they need to.

We’re structured like a small print quarterly. Each issue runs roughly three months and is themed loosely — the current one, Issue 04, is “The Daily Puzzle Edition.” The structure exists because it forces us to think about the magazine in seasons rather than impressions; we’d rather ship eight thoughtful reviews in a year than two thousand pageview-optimised “how to solve Wordle” permalinks.

ii How we’re funded

Mostly out of pocket, supplemented by a small number of reader donations and the occasional consulting contract for puzzle publishers who hire us to audit their accessibility. The site runs no display advertising and never has. We have no paywall and don’t plan to introduce one; the magazine is small enough to be sustainable as a side practice for five working writers and an editor.

What we don’t do: affiliate links, sponsored reviews, “in partnership with” content. If a puzzle publisher sends us a press kit, we read it. If they offer us money to write about their product, we don’t. The closest we come to a commercial relationship is that two of our staff (Cal and Priya) run small puzzle-adjacent tools you can find on our tools page; both are free and have been since launch.

The whole magazine is built on the assumption that you’d rather read one honest review than ten affiliate roundups.

iii The writing

The five writers on staff each cover a specific beat — I write Spelling Bee and anagrams; Theo writes themed crosswords; Priya writes the five-letter games; Cal writes strategy and runs the solver tools; Iris writes mobile crosswords and the long tail. Reviews are drafted by the beat writer, edited by me, and proofread by Iris before they ship. Strategy columns and long features go through the same chain.

The house style is deliberate: long sentences, a low caps-lock count, the Oxford comma, “-ise” spellings where the British and American forms disagree (a fight Iris and I have approximately once a quarter), and a willingness to use the first person when a writer has skin in a question. We’re writing reviews, not encyclopaedia entries; the writer’s opinion is part of the value.

iv Companion publications

A handful of small, single-purpose puzzle sites exist that we read every day and trust enough to link to. They’re run by writers we know or have worked with previously, and they publish answer companions for specific puzzles that aren’t in our daily rotation. Lexigo Answers covers the daily Lexigo. Shuffalo Answers covers the daily Shuffalo. Spelling Bee Answers is the companion I publish for the NYT Bee. Midi Crossword Answers covers the proliferating mid-size grid format. Jumble Solver is the anagram engine Cal built and still maintains.

We list these because we use them, not because we’re paid to. None of them are part of GameTipster’s editorial output and none of them pay us a thing. If you’re a puzzle publisher and you think your daily companion deserves a mention here, the answer is: write to me when your column has been running for a year and we’ll talk.

v Write to us

Tips, corrections, pitches, letters to the editor: [email protected]. We read everything; we reply to most of it; the things we can’t reply to are the ones asking us to review someone’s new puzzle app for “exposure.” I’m sorry; we don’t do that, no matter how nicely you ask.

// Margaux Lindgren, Editor-in-Chief · May 2026 · Mineola, NY / London, UK / Lagos, NG