Crossword Club Has Launched For The Times

After months of planning and development, Digital Marmalade are exceptionally proud to announce the launch of the new Crossword Club for The Times.  

Having been the preferred partner for all puzzle development over the last four years, it was only natural that News UK would approach us to rebuild the Crossword Club for The Times.  With several cracks starting to appear in the existing legacy site, Digital Marmalade set about the task of meticulously planning a rebuild.  While some of the existing site’s best features were retained, many were scrapped making way for a whole host of new functionality.  

Most notably, players now have the ability to play as either a “Private Player” or a “Leaderboard Player”. Private play allows more casual solvers to use cheat buttons such as ‘check’ and ‘reveal’, but scores for completing puzzles in this mode don’t count towards the leaderboards.   Meanwhile, a competitive “Leaderboard Player” will not get use of the ‘cheat’ buttons, but their scores will count towards the leaderboards.   The new site is also fully responsive across all devices, which represents a huge step forward for the club.

In the background, the club is powered by a CMS built on Marmalade Suite which gives the Times' puzzle production team a raft of tools for managing club users, re-scoring puzzles, moderating forums and creating news articles.

Given that we were replacing an existing service, this was an extremely difficult and delicate project. 16,000 puzzles were migrated over to the new site, as well as user stats and leaderboard information – that’s no mean feat!  

We’re excited to see how the site is received and further enhancements are already in the pipeline…well done team!