Why We Built Grid Leveling: A Solo Dev's Devlog

Grid Leveling started with a very specific frustration: LinkedIn's Queens puzzle gives you exactly one puzzle a day. I'd finish it in a few minutes, want another one, and... that was it. Come back tomorrow. The puzzle itself - place one queen in every row, column, and colored region with no two queens touching - is a beautiful piece of logic design, and one a day simply wasn't enough. So I built my own version with unlimited levels. That side project became the Queens game on Grid Leveling, and eventually a whole site.

The Hard Part: Generating Good Puzzles

Cloning the rules of a logic puzzle is easy; generating good boards is the actual work. A proper Queens board needs exactly one solution - if two arrangements satisfy every constraint, the puzzle can't be solved by deduction, only by luck. That means every generated level runs through a backtracking solver that verifies uniqueness before it ships. Difficulty is its own problem: an easy 5×5 board and a hard 10×10 board differ not just in size but in how many forced moves the region layout hands you at the start. Getting that curve right took far more iteration than writing the game itself.

Three Decisions I Made Early

• Free, with no account - progress lives in your browser's local storage. You lose cross-device sync, but you gain instant play: click a link, you're solving. For a puzzle site, that trade is worth it.
• No app download - everything runs in the browser, on desktop and mobile. A puzzle you can only play after an install is a puzzle most people never play.
• Daily puzzles are shared - every player worldwide gets the same daily board, released at midnight IST. A daily puzzle is only a ritual if everyone is solving the same one.

Then Came Sudoku and Wend

Once the Queens engine was stable, adding Sudoku was a natural second game - same deductive-logic appeal, and the classic 9×9 grid plus a quick 6×6 Mini variant cover both long and short sessions. The third game, Wend, is the original one: a word-path puzzle where you trace adjacent letters to spell every hidden word until each tile is used exactly once. It looks like a word game but solves like a tiling puzzle, and building its grid generator - words that interlock perfectly around wall tiles - was the most interesting engineering problem on the site so far.

The Stack, Briefly

Grid Leveling is a Next.js app: the game logic is plain TypeScript (pure functions for rules, solvers, and hint generation - no framework code in the domain layer), React for the boards and UI, and static generation for every page that doesn't need to be dynamic, which keeps the whole site fast on mobile connections. Levels are pre-generated by scripts and shipped as data, so the browser never has to run a solver to serve you a puzzle.

What's Next

The site keeps growing in the direction players pull it: more levels, better hints, and deeper strategy content like the Queens solving guide and the Wend strategy guide. If you want to see what the fuss is about, the Daily Queens puzzle, Daily Sudoku Challenge, and Daily Wend puzzle each take a few minutes - and there's always another level after that. That was the whole point.