The story behind dotio

In the summer of 2025, I got hooked on the New York Times Pips game. My family did too. We had a WhatsApp group where we'd discuss each day's puzzles, compare times, argue about whether the Hard was actually hard. It became a genuine daily ritual.

The problem was simple: I wanted more. Three puzzles a day wasn't enough. So I started building my own.

What began as "just make more puzzles" turned into a research project. I spent months researching what makes a puzzle good. When should the logic branch, how deep should the deduction chains go, what separates a satisfying solve from a frustrating one. The answer I kept coming back to: no guessing. Every puzzle should be solvable through pure logic, from Easy all the way up to Expert.

It got into a fun technical place. I'd generate puzzles that my solver couldn't solve, so I'd have to make the solver smarter. Then the smarter solver would let me generate harder puzzles, which it also couldn't solve. That loop went on for months. Every improvement to the solver unlocked a new tier of puzzle complexity.

I hand-curated every grid shape, and loved it. Trying to make recognisable shapes out of 20 dominoes was a ritual over coffee (a lion was too ambitious). But I was solving hundreds of puzzles a day, and my sense of difficulty quietly ballooned. My "Medium" puzzles crept from 10 dominoes up to 15, with deduction chains that went far too deep. It took a few honest friends in beta testing to tell me I'd lost perspective. I pulled it back.

dotio is a huge creative outlet for me, and the best part has been hearing from players. People tell me about their own WhatsApp groups, their office rivalries on the daily leaderboard, their streaks they refuse to break. Someone's mum plays every morning with her coffee. A group of teachers compete during lunch. That's exactly what I hoped would happen.