Lab guide
How to make a puzzle
You give the Lab your answers, the rule for putting them in order, and a few distractors. The Lab builds the board.
Start with the answer set
Every puzzle is defined by its answers, in the order the player should tap them. A numbers puzzle might use ten primes; a words puzzle might list ten animals. Keep it between five and fifteen for a first draft.
A good answer set has a rule a player can see once they have three or four in a row. A random list is not a puzzle, it is a memory test.
The walk-through
- 1
Open the Lab and pick a category
Go to the Lab and press Create a puzzle. Choose Numbers, Letters, Words or Custom. Custom lets you supply any answer values, which is what you want for anything outside the built-in stages.
- 2
Name it and describe the rule
A short title, a one-line description (this is what your friends see on the challenge card), and an instruction that tells the player how to order the answers.
Example. Title: UK cities by population. Description: Order the eight from biggest to smallest. Instruction: Tap the cities from largest population to smallest.
- 3
Enter the correct answers, in order
Type them as a comma-separated list in the Correct answers field. The Lab treats their order in this list as the correct sequence.
Example. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Liverpool, Bristol.
- 4
Add distractors
These are the wrong-but-plausible tiles that sit alongside the answers. Also comma-separated. Aim for one and a half times as many distractors as answers, so a guess is not free but reading is still possible.
Example. Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Newcastle, Nottingham, Southampton, Aberdeen, Cambridge, Oxford, Bath, Portsmouth, Reading.
Numbers and Letters categories fill this in for you unless you override it.
- 5
Set difficulty, board size and timing
Difficulty affects the scoring curve. Board size controls how many tiles show at once. Timing is countdown, count-up or untimed. If in doubt, leave Dynamic on: the Lab picks a countdown that matches the answer count.
- 6
Save and test
Save stores the draft on this device. Save & test also opens the puzzle so you can play it. Solve it end to end and the results screen offers to mark it verified.
Verified puzzles are ones you have actually solved with your own rules, so a friend who tries yours knows it is playable.
- 7
Share the challenge link
From the results screen or the stage share button, copy the challenge link. The link contains the whole puzzle; anyone who opens it plays your exact board with your exact rules. No account needed.
Two ways to speed this up
- Try a sample. The Lab’s Try a sample button drops in a working animals puzzle so you can see every field filled in before you edit yours.
- Ask the drafter. Inside the editor, type a topic into the drafter and it builds a first pass for you to edit. It is a rules engine by default, so it works offline; a remote AI gateway is optional and off unless you have configured it.