How the puzzle game ‘Puckdoku’ took the hockey world by storm this summer

Like thousands of hockey fans, Taylor Dixon completes his Puckdoku puzzle each morning with varying degrees of success.

The die-hard Vancouver Canucks fan usually nails anything related to his favourite team, but Dixon rarely achieves a perfect puzzle.

“Usually, I get seven out of nine. Or maybe eight out of nine,” says Dixon.

While those are admirable scores, there is a significant caveat that needs to be added for context. Dixon is not only a participant in the trivia game that is taking the hockey world by storm, he is also in charge of creating the puzzles each day.

“I’ll be honest, I’m not super good at my own game,” Dixon says, laughing. “I pick the categories, but it doesn’t mean I can correctly pick the players.”

Each morning, shortly after 6 a.m., Dixon makes two cups of coffee — one for his wife and one for himself — and checks the puzzle that was loaded onto the Puckdoku site at midnight Pacific Time. He makes sure there aren’t any glaring mistakes or issues that require his immediate attention. A few weeks ago, an error occurred involving the system not recognizing that Eric Brewer played 1,000 games in the NHL, causing Dixon’s inbox to be deluged with complaints about the oversight.

But once he confirms the current day’s puzzle is accurate and issue-free, Dixon starts working on one for the following day. He does each puzzle by hand, generally only working one day in advance. He does have the ability to schedule them, which allowed him to take a brief camping trip in July, while still having fresh games loaded onto the site for the weekend he was away.

Puckdoku — which has an appeal similar to Sudoku or the word play game Wordle, except for hockey fans — is a puzzle game with three rows and three columns. Each row and column features an NHL team logo or a statistical milestone or award. Participants are required to fill in each box with a player who fits both categories, having played for both teams, reached a statistical milestone or captured that specific award.

Dixon tries to go into each day thinking of ways to ensure the game is intriguing for new visitors to his site and not repetitive for players who are addicted to Puckdoku.

“I try and keep things from getting stale. So I try and rotate teams in a semi-fair way and think of new and fun categories to keep people engaged,” explains Dixon. “What haven’t I done in a while? What is something easy to understand? If you need a three-paragraph explainer, it won’t work.”

He denies any suggestion that he rigs or fixes the puzzles with subtle themes. Recently, a Puckdoku puzzle featured a game in which Todd Bertuzzi was an option for all nine squares.

“That was just a coincidence,” says Dixon. “I never have a specific player in mind.”

Dixon always tries to ensure there are multiple options for each box, so that the game doesn’t become too specific or difficult. And he tries to always double check his work before posting to catch any shortcomings. Dixon recently sketched out a puzzle that included an option for 100-point players who played for the New Jersey Devils — until he realized Jack Hughes just set the franchise record with 99 points last season.

The idea for creating Puckdoku was planted in Dixon’s mind when he was listening to an episode of the “Puck Soup” hockey podcast earlier this summer. Hosts Ryan Lambert and Sean McIndoe were engaging in a fun trivia segment, which resembled a puzzle game like Sudoku.

Dixon was listening and thought, “Hey, I can actually build that.”

It took him a few days to get the program up and running and settle on a name, but he was ready to launch the site on July 1.

“I was bouncing around some fun names. And this game is like Sudoku, but not really,” said Dixon. “And Puckdoku was available for a domain name, so it just made sense.”

After posting the first puzzle, Dixon emailed McIndoe — who is also a columnist with The Athletic — to alert him that his Puckdoku site was live. McIndoe promptly tweeted out a link to his 150,000 followers on Twitter and the game instantly exploded in the hockey community.

“I was getting ready for bed that night and I got a notification on my web hosting site that said, ‘You’ve gone through 50 percent of your free tier,’” says Dixon. “I was thinking, ‘Wow. That’s weird.’”

Two minutes later, another message pinged.

“You’ve gone through 75 percent of your free tier.”

Another minute passed and Dixon’s server was at full capacity.

“You’ve gone through 100 percent of your free tier.”

“That was the moment for me that made it clear people want to play this,” says Dixon. “It just took off.”

Roughly one month after launching the game, Dixon says up to 40,000 unique players are completing a full puzzle each day. The number of visitors is more than twice that — probably closer to the 100,000 range — with many people stopping by and trying out the puzzle without actually finishing it.

The traffic for his site is busiest in the morning, with more than half of the players visiting Puckdoku before 9 a.m. Pacific Time.

“It’s definitely part of people’s morning routine or their commute into work,” says Dixon.

Die-hard Puckdoku fans are now obsessed with trying to register the lowest “uniqueness score” possible. The lower the score, the more rare or obscure each player was inside his box. For example, a square needing to be filled by someone who played for the New York Rangers and Edmonton Oilers could feature the likes of Wayne Gretzky or Mark Messier. But since many people would likely choose them, those players would have a relatively high uniqueness score — with probably 30 or 40 percent of users selecting the Hall of Famers.

A goalie like Cam Talbot would register a lower score, maybe in the range of 5 or 10 percent. And if users really wanted a low uniqueness score in the Edmonton-New York box, they could opt to put Todd Marchant in that square — considering he did suit up for a single game with the Rangers in 1993-94. (A player needs to appear in at least one game with a franchise to be an eligible answer.) Marchand would probably be used by less than 1 percent of players, so he would generate one of the lowest scores possible.

Dixon says he’s seen a couple of perfect nine-for-nine puzzles that came in with a final uniqueness score of 0.

“I round down with the decimal places. So a 0.1 actually registers as a zero,” explains Dixon. “So a couple of times, we’ve had a zero uniqueness score.”

Dixon has enjoyed seeing the game take on a life of its own over the past few weeks, with the St. Louis Blues and the University of Michigan having some fun with their own Puckdoku games on social media. The baseball community has been obsessed with “The Immaculate Grid” this summer and recently, Hockey Reference launched their own version of “The Immaculate Grid” for NHL fans.

Dixon realizes the competition around his trivia game will be fierce, so he wants to make sure his puzzle is always evolving. He bookends his full eight-hour workday at his office job in Calgary by spending mornings and evenings working on puzzle ideas and formats. Dixon sends prototypes for new puzzles to his close circle of friends to test out formats to see if they like his ideas.

He’s contemplated adding a row or column for specific jersey numbers, but he’s found that might be too challenging for the average player.

“That would be really tough. Like if you’re not a Montreal Canadiens fan, for example, you might not know all the jersey numbers for that team,” says Dixon.

Dixon has also toyed around with the idea of doing team-specific puzzles, where he could be a little more challenging and use obscure things such as jersey numbers or players’ initials.

“We’ll see where it goes. I’m just focused on delivering a good experience for our players. There are a lot of places we’re going to take this,” says Dixon. “I wasn’t expecting it to be this big. I just wanted it to be a fun summer thing.”