Board games and puzzles have a similar appeal in that when you're interacting with them, you're solving problems, specifically problems that you've chosen to take on and that ideally challenge you in interesting, fun ways.
I love both board games and puzzles, but I usually interact with them in different settings: board games in the real world with other humans, and puzzles in a digital environment on my own. Over the past several months, though, board games have kept popping up in one of my prime puzzle sources: online site Puzzmo.
I started using Puzzmo in September 2025, then signed up for an annual membership in December. Without a membership, you can access only the current day's puzzles — and not even all of those current puzzles unless you sign up for a free trial. I had played enough that the site seemed worth the cost, and I've continued to enjoy the site since then, with many more puzzles featured than I solve each day. [By the way, this is neither a sponsored post nor an affiliate link. I just wanted to write about my hobbies overlapping.]
Puzzmo features two new crossword puzzles daily, along with a once-a-week giant puzzle. The larger daily crossword puzzle is submitted by a variety of contributors, while the smaller daily crossword is created by the same person for an entire month, which gives you a window into that creator's personality as you see themes and clue styles repeating in their puzzles over the weeks.
Here are the two board-game related clues from Enrique in the puzzle shown at top:
And here's a clue from the June 15, 2026 mini-puzzle from creator halle, who frequently presented rectangular grids with no internal blocks:
And the May 25, 2026 mini-puzzle from creator leo tsai:
With leo tsai also inserting a less-well-known game in their May 21, 2026 mini-puzzle, although you possibly get the answer anyway from context:
Other crossword puzzles have referenced CATAN, Spirit Island, Caverna, Wingspan (again), Blood on the Clocktower (several times), The Crew, Sky Team, and a Ticket to Ride expansion that feels like it would be a deep cut for a casual gamer.
And sometimes the game name is itself an answer, as with this October 30, 2025 puzzle:
I'm sure you get the idea by this point, but I wanted to highlight these board game-puzzle crossovers as I appreciate the interlinking of my hobby worlds, in addition to Puzzmo's approach of featuring more casual clues that express the personality of the puzzle creators.
