It's been a gradual process over the last 5.5 months. Here are some of the things that worked for me:

- I applied to showcase the game at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game Squad. They accepted me so I was able to showcase it at the expo for a day. This got me some players right off the bat

- I shared it on HN, Reddit, Mastodon, etc.

- The website Thinky Games wrote an article about it

- The YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic shared it which got a lot of new players. More recently a couple of other YouTubers (Timotab and Stro Solves) have been posting videos regularly

- I link to it from my blog, and this unrelated rant went semi-viral in web dev circles: https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/shadcn-radio-button/

- Winning the award gave me more visibility and players

I've also tried using things like Instagram and Discord but haven't had much luck there. I don't really get how those platforms work.

To be honest I'm not great at marketing. I've just been experimenting and seeing what works.

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I would say the most important thing is the game itself:

- I've worked hard to gather feedback and incorporate it into the gameplay.

- I focus on keeping the puzzles fresh and striking the right difficulty level. (Challenging but something most people can do in 10 minutes.)

- I built a sharing feature that ~300 or so people use a day

I think all my marketing would have been useless if people didn't like the game and want to play again and share it with their friends.

I remember seeing this! It was cool, and I will remember to play it more.

Re creating puzzles, does this mean you have to manually do them one per day? Is there a way to automate them ahead of time (as in have an app generate a bunch of puzzles you can pick from or tweak)?

This is something I’ve been grappling with.

I’ve automated parts of the process. Once I have the words and clues I can autogenerate crosswords and pick the best one.

I’m hesitant to automate the creation of the theme, words, and clues though. I worry that the quality would go down but there may be some opportunities to speed up brainstorming there. I’ve been noodling on this.