Wordle who? The Atlantic launches a suite of new daily puzzles and games

The Atlantic debuted a handful of new games and puzzles on Tuesday. The magazine’s “digital parlor of puzzles and play” now includes:

• A fill-in-the-blank game with a history twist called Bracket City. The game is licensed from creator Ben Gross.
• The “devilishly difficult” Caleb’s Inferno is a crossword from The Atlantic’s resident puzzle master that gets more difficult as you solve downward. (“See how far down you can go before you abandon all hope.”)
• An original word game called Fluxis where players get additional points for using letters from previous words in subsequent answers.
• A Tetris-like word game called Stacks.
• And a daily crossword puzzle that grows in size (and gets more challenging) as the week goes on. On Mondays, the puzzle is 5×5; it grows to a 9×9 grid by Friday.

The Atlantic celebrated 1 million subscribers (and profitability) last year. Subscriptions have grown by double digits each of the past four years, including 15% from 2023 to 2024. The jaw-dropping Signalgate coverage earlier this year has only boosted that trend, a spokesperson said. At the end of March, just a few weeks after breaking the story, The Atlantic had already gained more net new subscribers in three months in 2025 than all of 2024.

The reasoning behind The Atlantic’s new games is no secret. The New York Times has seen massive success with its puzzles, anchored by the free once-a-day Wordle. The top of a successful games funnel can be huge; New York Times puzzles and games were played more than 8 billion times last year. Like the Times, The Atlantic is adopting a metering strategy that aims to convert free players into paying subscribers. Bracket City will be free to play, Caleb’s Inferno is subscriber-only, and the three other games (Crossword, Fluxis, and Stacks) will have the three most recent games free to play, with archives behind the paywall.

A once-a-day puzzle that becomes a habit and keeps readers coming back can be valuable for news organizations.

“We’re looking at [the puzzles] from the standpoint of daily engagement and habit building,” said Megha Garibaldi, The Atlantic’s chief growth officer. “There’s an opportunity to engage our readers and subscribers in a way that brings them [to the site] more often.”

Having a non-news reason for readers to head to your site may be even more important as news avoidance continues to rise. News organizations of all sizes and stripes are launching new puzzles and games to run alongside their journalism.

“The first [New York Times] crossword puzzle ran in 1942, not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The tradition of putting games into the paper as a diversion [has been around] from the tough news cycles of the 1940s to the tough news cycles of today,” New York Times head of games Jonathan Knight told Nieman Lab in 2022. “When news went digital, we focused more on the news, but now we’re getting back to that Sunday paper experience.”

Wordle is popular, in part, because it’s very easy. The Atlantic games are easy enough to learn, but on the whole, they’re a bit brainier.

“I think that this suite of games is going to appeal to intellectual play — to curious minds who are looking for a little bit more or something a little different,” Garibaldi said. “We believe that there is an acquisition element and an audience development element attached to it. Outside of the immense subscriber engagement that we think this will drive, I think it’s going to expand to new audiences who will be interested in some of these games.”

The Atlantic debuted Bracket City in April. The Atlantic declined to give exact numbers but said the original loyal audience for the nested clue game has already increased threefold since Bracket City came to The Atlantic. The nested clues (occasionally with helpful emoji) ultimately reveal a daily historical fact.

“As soon as I saw it, I loved it and knew we needed to get it on The Atlantic,” said director of games Caleb Madison. “One thing I like about it is that it could only really exist digitally, as opposed to the crossword, which was birthed into print and still has a lot of standards from the analog days.”

The results page for the nested clues game invokes both the Queen Bee ranking of Spelling Bee and the green squares of Wordle. The Bracket City cinematic universe includes the tourist (the lowliest rank), chief of police, mayor, and power broker. Each puzzle generates a link — often to Wikipedia or YouTube — to learn more about the this-day-in-history fact revealed.

Between the Bracket City characters and the Dante-esque journey of Caleb’s Inferno, Madison said the games were designed to contain a narrative that compels readers to keep solving and returning.

“It’s important to have a narrative component,” Madison said. “There should be a sense of progress and personal journey.”

The Atlantic launched the new hub for games with a Tarot-inspired design. Madison described it as giving a “mystical vibe” invoking an old-timey games parlor.

“Games and puzzles are essentially cryptic and enigmatic and mysterious. Games date back to ancient Egypt, ancient Babylonia. People have been doing this forever. As long as they’ve been telling stories and sharing food, they’ve been playing games,” Madison said. “I think [the new design] connects the digital play with The Atlantic’s history in a really elegant and immersive way.”

To put it into Bracket City language, you can [work performed in a theater] [not later] here.