I've been part of the Laravel community for a long time.
Maybe we met at Laracon in Chicago, Denver, or New York. Maybe I've sponsored your GitHub project. Maybe I bought you something cheap from your wedding registry.
Maybe I sent you honey.
Over the years, this community has taught me an enormous amount about how to build software — and, more importantly, how to turn an idea into an actual product.
So I wanted to say thank you.
And I wanted to show you what all that help produced.
It's called Puzzle Party.
Puzzle Party isn't a game. It's a place to play the games you're already playing — Wordle, Connections, Strands, crosswords, and other daily puzzles — with people you already know.
If you've ever texted a Wordle result to your family or had a group chat where everyone posts their daily puzzle scores, you already understand the basic idea behind Puzzle Party.
We take that simple habit and make it a lot more fun. Your results are automatically organized into daily scoreboards, rankings and stats. You can talk about the puzzles together without spoiling them for people who haven't played yet. And it all happens in private Parties with the people you actually want to stay connected to.
No algorithm. No public feed. No garbage from people you don't know.
And it takes almost no extra effort. Share a result once and it goes to every Party you're in that plays that game. The puzzle you were going to play anyway becomes a small daily interaction with your family, old friends, former coworkers — whoever you wish you heard from a little more often.
Tomorrow, you do it again.
Very little effort. A little more connection. Every day.
That's the idea.
And, because this is Laravel News…
I've been using Laravel for a long time. I was an early user of Forge and Envoyer, spent several years running things on Vapor, and now Puzzle Party runs on Laravel Cloud. I'm ecstatic about Cloud — it really is a game changer. Hopefully Puzzle Party gets really big and we get to find out just how well it scales.
The mobile app itself is built in Dart and Flutter, backed by Laravel. I've spent a lot of time developing an AI-assisted workflow that lets me build surprisingly good stuff surprisingly quickly with that combination. If anyone in the Laravel community is interested in what I've learned about Laravel + Flutter + AI, I'm always happy to talk about it.
We use Reverb extensively for real-time messaging — Puzzle Party effectively has iMessage built into it, right down to presence channels showing who's typing. I've also been using Nova since its early days, and AI turns out to be remarkably good at building sophisticated Nova dashboards.
And I've built a custom MCP server for Puzzle Party which, combined with Nightwatch and its MCP server, gives me an extraordinary window into what's happening inside the app.
Forge. Envoyer. Vapor. Cloud. Nova. Reverb. Nightwatch. MCP. AI.
The tools have changed enormously over the years. What hasn't changed is how much I've learned from this community — and how much better it has made me at turning ideas into products.
I've been building software and startups for a very long time. What's remarkable to me is that I'm still getting better at it.
And Laravel and the people around it are a huge reason why.
Puzzle Party isn't a demo or a side project that I'm going to forget about next month. I care deeply about it. I've spent an absurd amount of time on it.
And I'm really proud of what we've built.
One problem I haven't solved
There's one problem I'm still trying to solve, and I'd love the community's thoughts on it.
Puzzle Party has an unusual onboarding challenge: it takes two people to really experience it. I can get you to download the app and play a puzzle, but the magic doesn't happen until you've created a Party and someone you know joins you.
I've tried to make that process as easy as possible, but there's still a chicken-and-egg problem there.
If you've built something with a similar network effect — or just have a clever idea for solving it — I'd genuinely love to hear what worked for you.
How do you let someone experience the value of a product when part of that value is another person?
So, to everyone whose code I've used, whose articles I've read, whose talks I've watched, whose GitHub issues have saved me hours, or whose advice I've benefited from:
Thank you.
And if you're curious about what all of that helped me build, I'd love for you to try Puzzle Party.
Better yet, make a Party with a few people you wish you talked to a little more often.
That's what it's for.
