The Amazing Puzzle Factory Brings Traditional Pen and Paper Puzzles to Facebook

The Amazing Puzzle Factory is a Facebook game from British company IdeasPad, loosely based on their Puzzler World titles for the Nintendo DS, which are in turn licensed from long-running British puzzle magazine, Puzzler. Since the game's launch in mid-April, The Amazing Puzzle Factory has enjoyed steady growth up to present-day levels of over 54,000 monthly active users and 6,000 daily active users. Most of this growth seems to be from viral measures like friend invites or wall posts and from banner clicks from the recently launched display ad network, Appatyze. Gameplay centers on traditional pen and paper puzzles such as crosswords, Kriss Kross, Sudoku and word searches. Players are scored based on how quickly they complete the challenges. Games are mostly controlled by using the mouse, though crossword puzzles require words to be typed in using the keyboard. There is a Daily Puzzle players can complete that awards weekly bonuses to regular players. There's also an in-game leaderboard for players to compare scores or "IQ points," the game's equivalent of experience points, with friends. The Amazing Puzzle Factory is monetized through Facebook Credits, which can be spent on three main items of in-game currency: Puzzle Tokens that unlock individual puzzles; Nuts, which are used to purchase hints during puzzles; and Bolts, which are used to unlock harder difficulty levels. Successfully completing levels rewards players with all these different currencies at different points, but the use of Facebook Credits allows players to jump straight to harder puzzles if they believe their puzzling skills are up to scratch. The game doesn't offer much in the way of social features beyond bragging rights for leaderboard scores. The lack of direct social interaction between players is unsurprising given the solitary nature of the puzzles, but the fact that friends are not required to progress limits the amount of viral growth The Amazing Puzzle Factory can leverage. Even so, the inclusion of the Daily Puzzle and rewards for regular players could be an effective way of maintaining a loyal base of daily users, which could make the game successful in the long run. Unfortunately, we weren't able to reach developer IdeasPad to find out future plans for the game, but it's easy to see how it can expand through content. The modular nature of puzzle progression means that it will be simple to add new puzzles across the four different categories and potentially even new categories. There are no virtual items for players to collect besides the currency units, but there are a number of achievement "badges" for players to acquire, so another route for future development is to add increasingly-challenging tasks for players to complete. As it is, the highest level of badges requires the completion of over a thousand puzzles, so players should be kept occupied for some time. You can follow The Amazing Puzzle Factory's progress on AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

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The Amazing Puzzle Factory Brings Traditional Pen and Paper Puzzles to Facebook

Pete Davison

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