In short

The beta is a complete redesign of Puzzel.org, running side by side with the current site. It is not a new product: it works on exactly the same accounts, the same activities and the same data. An activity you build in the beta opens normally on the current site, and the other way round. What changed is everything you see and how you get around — plus a long list of things that simply weren't possible before.

At this point the beta covers the whole product: all 29 activity types can be built and played there, in all 23 languages, and everything that used to send you back to the old dashboard now happens in the new design.

1. Look and feel

A completely new visual design: new colours, new typography, new page layouts, new icons.
Activity cards no longer use the old screenshot images. Every activity type now has its own small hand-drawn illustration, so pages load far lighter and each puzzle type is recognisable at a glance.
Pages that are tools (the builder, the dashboard, the play screens, checkout) get their own focused layout without marketing navigation around them.
Shared links now show a proper preview card in WhatsApp, Slack, Teams and social media, instead of a bare URL.
Error pages are part of the design now: a real "page not found" and "something went wrong" page instead of a bare technical screen.

2. Making activities — the builder

All 29 builders have been rebuilt.

Settings are grouped by what you are trying to do ("Timing & attempts", "Look & feel", "Info & visibility", "Results & tracking", "Finish") instead of by the old thirteen technical blocks. Each type shows its essentials first, with everything else behind "Advanced".
Settings that depend on another setting are no longer invisible: they are shown dimmed with a clickable note saying what to switch on first.
Every setting label and hint has been rewritten. The old texts described a different interface and had drifted out of date.
The manual crossword builder and the bingo host console are proper views of the builder now, rather than separate detours.
A fix worth naming: the old builder could quietly create empty draft activities just from a page being left open. The beta only creates one once you actually start working.

3. Playing activities

All 29 activity types can be played in the beta, including all the group and multiplayer modes (challenges, teams, same-device play, bingo, board game turns) and the embed and single-sign-on flows used by schools.

The play screen is now one clear frame: title and instructions, live timer and progress, audio and actions all belong to the same panel, with the puzzle itself in the middle wearing the owner's own colours and fonts.
All the screens around the activity — closed, not yet open, password, monthly limit reached, registration, completion, time is up, leaderboard — have been redesigned and rewritten.
The wording now speaks to the person actually reading it. A player who hits an activity's monthly limit is told the person who shared it can raise it, rather than being shown an upgrade offer they can't act on. Waiting rooms say what they are waiting for. A closed activity shows the real opening window.
Motion and feedback: boards animate, answers are acknowledged, and endings are given a moment, per activity type.
Embedded activities stay white-label — no Puzzel branding inside somebody else's website, same as today.
Results recorded in the beta are byte-for-byte the same as results recorded on the current site, so nothing in your dashboard, exports or webhooks changes.

5. Results and tracking

This is one of the biggest gains.

Results now live in the dashboard instead of behind a separate link: a twelve-month chart per account, most-played this month, and per activity a session chart, average score and time.
Per activity you can see every player who has a saved result, what each of them answered per question, and how many players got each question right — and you can open either a single player's report or a single question's report.
Assessment quizzes are read the right way round: which outcome band each player landed in, who is in each band, and the answers that took them there.
New: comparing players across a folder. One row per person, one square per activity in the folder, showing who finished what and how they scored — with a click through to that person's own overview. Puzzel matches the same person across activities by student id, employee id, email or name, and tells you how many results carry each, so you can choose.

6. Sharing and collaboration

Copying an activity is one dialog with two clear questions: reuse this content (duplicate it, or convert it into a different activity type), or send a copy to another Puzzel.org account. The receiving side has its own page and a banner on the dashboard, so you don't need the email.
Shared folders got their own page for students: a folder link now opens a designed page, you can link to a subfolder directly, and the back button works the way people expect on a phone.
Folders can carry a description — the short introduction a teacher writes for the class, and often the only context students get.

7. Buying, billing and invoices

The seven separate upgrade forms on the current site are one checkout page in the beta: starting a subscription, switching plan, changing duration, credits, sessions or auto-renewal, and renewing.
The page is honest about what will happen: whether you'll be sent to a payment screen, charged to the card on file, or charged nothing at all today.
Invoices can be viewed, printed and shared from a permanent link, so support can paste a link into a reply rather than talking someone through the dashboard.

8. Information pages

Help centre: all 32 articles rewritten and 10 new ones added (40+ in total). The old ones described controls that no longer exist ("the orange floppy icon"). The new ones name the real buttons and settings, and every claim about limits, prices and plans is checked against the actual configuration.
Roadmap: shipped items and proposed ideas are now two proper pages with tabs between them, so "go vote on this" is a link you can send. Ideas that have been built are now shown as shipped, which was invisible before. Vote counts are the real counts (the old view showed "1" for an idea with no votes). Unapproved ideas are no longer shown to signed-in users — that was moderation by accident.
New: a vendor / IT information page aimed at a school's IT department — contact details, firewall allowlist, which data is collected, sub-processors, plan sizes — all read from the running system rather than typed by hand.
A human-readable sitemap page and its machine equivalent, generated from one list so they can't disagree.

9. Languages

The beta speaks all 23 languages the site does. English is at /beta/..., the other 22 at /beta/{language}/.... Every new piece of text is translated as part of the work that adds it, rather than being handled in a later batch, and there is a check that refuses to ship English-only copy.

10. Accessibility

A full WCAG 2.1 AA review of both the current site and the beta (all 29 activity types, both builders, both shells) was carried out in September 2026 and the shared fixes have shipped — on both sites, and additively, so nothing changed for mouse and touch users. Highlights: skip links, visible focus rings, proper keyboard access to uploads and builder rows, spoken feedback in the play screens (crossword, memory, hangman, wordle, bingo), reduced-motion support, a flashing bingo effect slowed to a safe rate, deeper text colours to meet contrast, and alt-text and pause-button settings made free rather than premium.

13. What hasn't changed

The data. Same accounts, same activities, same results, same subscriptions. Everything works in both versions at the same time.
Embed codes already pasted on other websites, and LTI links already stored in a Canvas or Moodle course, keep pointing at the current URLs — deliberately, so nothing anyone has already published breaks.
Prices, plans and limits are unchanged.

14. What happens at launch

The beta is currently hidden from search engines on purpose and points search engines at the current pages. Launch is not a redirect: the redesigned pages simply move onto the existing addresses, so every link, bookmark, QR code and embed keeps working and only the design behind them changes. The plan is to invite testers for one to two weeks first, fix what the feedback surfaces, and then make the switch.

All of your input is welcome! So please email me at daan@puzzel.org
Have fun!

roadmap