DESIGNER-STUDY · 2026-07-07
Inside Zach Gage's Philosophy — Rebuilding Games You Already Know
SpellTower / Really Bad Chess / Good Sudoku / Puzzmo and ‘breadth and depth’
Introduction
Zach Gage is an American game designer based in New York. SpellTower (2011), Really Bad Chess (2016), Typeshift (2017), Good Sudoku (2020), Knotwords (2022) and the daily-puzzle site Puzzmo (2023) — his body of work is a run of familiar classics that everyone at least knows by name (chess, sudoku, solitaire, crosswords, poker), taken apart and reassembled. Since Wordle, daily-puzzle culture has begun to bring his name to Japanese puzzle fans too, but few here have actually read his own words.
I take him up now because Puzzmo joined Hearst in 2023 (Digital Trends, 2023 ↗) and, with Pile-Up Poker added in 2024, he has begun building in earnest what he calls a daily home for puzzles. This is not a tour of his games. It is an attempt to trace, using only his public statements, what this designer who keeps rebuilding existing games is obsessed with — and what he is trying to avoid.
Background — from art to puzzles
Gage was born in New York in 1985 and raised in a family of artists. According to his Wikipedia biography, his mother allowed few game purchases at home and instead encouraged him to make his own games; this do-it-yourself instinct later became his way out of creative slumps (Wikipedia: Zach Gage ↗).
He studied art at Skidmore College and took a new-media MFA at Parsons School of Design. His best-known student work, Lose/Lose (2009), was a conceptual piece in which shooting an on-screen alien actually deleted a corresponding file on the player's hard drive — the security company Symantec classified it as malware (Wikipedia ↗). That he began as a gallery artist before moving to commercial App Store puzzles is not incidental to how his design reads.
SpellTower (2011) was a commercial success and, by his Wikipedia record, led him to decline several venture-capital offers in order to stay independent (Wikipedia ↗). He went on to do iOS work on Vlambeer's Ridiculous Fishing and the iOS port of Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It, while stacking up reinterpretations of existing games — Really Bad Chess, Good Sudoku, Knotwords.
Philosophy — anyone can win, experts can still compete
Across interviews, the line he returns to is holding breadth and depth at once. On Pile-Up Poker he says a game “should be something that anybody at any skill level can play and win, but people who are really highly skilled can play at a super high level and really compete” (Six Colors, 2024 ↗). He describes poker's magic as the fact that “you can play poker with your friends for 20 years and then someone can show up and have never played poker before and win” — and that beginner-can-still-win quality is what he wanted to bring to Puzzmo (Six Colors, 2024 ↗).
He pushes further: “A game has a responsibility to educate its players and turn low-skill players into high-skill players” (Six Colors, 2024 ↗). A game is not only a machine for enjoyment but one that takes on the job of making you better — that framing of an obligation to educate reads as central to his design ethics, well beyond mere accessibility.
Beyond that he makes a larger claim: that what people mostly exchange today is gossip or second-hand information, and that what we should share is not opinions and emotions but discoveries and creations. What he is trying to do with Puzzmo, he says, is put something creative and curious in front of people so they go tell a friend “here's a thing I tried” or “my strategy today was really weird” (Six Colors, 2024 ↗). He is designing puzzles as vessels for healthy social connection.
Obsessions — three reads, and prototypes you can touch
Two methods recur across his work. One is a graphic-design idea he calls “three reads.” Just as in poster design, he builds the screen around a three-tier priority: the star you see first, the information you actually need next, and the details you only see when you need them. On SpellTower he notes that deciding “how do I make sure that everybody's eyes are looking at the right part” is far more complicated than picking colors (Inverse, 2017 ↗). The almost over-tidy clarity of his puzzles reads as the habit of a communication-design-trained maker.
The other is the question of how to carry a player to the spot he himself enjoys. He explains: “I sort of fiddle around with systems until I find something that I like. But then when I show that to other people, they don't find their way to the same part of it that I'm enjoying.” So the first job of design, he says, is “how do I get a person who's playing this to the place that I'm enjoying?” (Inverse, 2017 ↗).
And that search often happens off-screen. “A lot of the time, I'll do something with cards, or board game pieces,” he says — the computer prototype comes later; first he checks the mechanism with something he can hold (Inverse, 2017 ↗). His habit of rebuilding existing card and board games is continuous with this hands-on approach.
Struggles and how he got through them
Two publicly told “it-didn't-work” stories. One is his very starting point. “When I did SpellTower, it was because I really didn't like word games. I'm into exploring genres that I don't like, because they're totally new to me” (Inverse, 2017 ↗). He walked straight into a genre he disliked and, in doing so, opened himself a gateway into actually enjoying word games. He doesn't avoid what he's bad at; he turns it into material.
The other is technical and organizational. SpellTower's multiplayer was a slog; he even set about rewriting the whole game in another language and burned time on false starts. “When I wrote SpellTower, it was just me, and it was my first hit game, and so I had never really worked with other people,” he says — a major update took five years because he was learning how to work with contractors and teams as he went (Inverse, 2017 ↗). He doesn't hide the delay; he re-tells it as growth, noting the same update wouldn't take five years today.
Design dilemmas
One dilemma he speaks of directly is his resistance to “you could play this forever.” He deliberately capped Pile-Up Poker at five hands a day. “I'll be honest: five hands is even more than I am sort of into. I would like it to be three.” Having played it as much as he wanted in development, he knew the burnout feeling, and says: “I never want people to be playing one of my games and go, 'What am I doing? Why am I doing this right now?'” (Six Colors, 2024 ↗). If it were an app he'd have to allow infinite play, he adds — but he'd then situate the interesting high-level experience in a separate daily challenge. He names this tug-of-war between commercial engagement and player wellbeing openly.
The other is how to handle chance. He calls out, by name, a famous Sid Meier talk arguing randomness doesn't work for humans, saying he “actually really hate[s]” it. Against the claim that a stated 90% should be made 100%, he thinks “that's just not correct” — roll a ten-sided die told you succeed unless you roll a one, and if you roll the one you'll think “I can't believe I did that,” not “randomness is broken” (Six Colors, 2024 ↗). Not removing luck but designing it to feel fun — which echoes his role on Tharsis making chance exciting (Wikipedia ↗).
Influences
Several influences he acknowledges himself. First, his mother and the newspaper puzzle page. On the core idea of Puzzmo he says: “my mom doesn't care about games ... But growing up, she tried new games. And where did I see that? Well, it was in the newspaper, because she played the crossword.” After a month of a game simply sitting next to the crossword, you give it a shot — that “put it right next to” structure is the newspaper's crucial strength (Digital Trends, 2023 ↗).
Second, Sid Meier as a foil. As above, he sharpens his own view of probability by explicitly rejecting Meier's talk on randomness (Six Colors, 2024 ↗). Influence works not only as admiration but as “this is wrong.”
Third, an anecdote about Spelunky's daily mode. He and a friend played the roguelike under a rule of one game a day, watching each other, for six months, and he became remarkably good; on the strength of that he lobbied the developer to add a daily mode to the PC version — a moment he credits with helping daily modes spread across roguelikes (Six Colors, 2024 ↗). The “once a day” constraint flows straight into today's Puzzmo.
Kizuki's reading
From here on this is my reading, Kizuki's. I read Gage as a conceptual artist who left the gallery. His student piece Lose/Lose was an experiment questioning “following directions” and its real consequences — shoot an alien, lose a file. That gesture and his puzzles today are, I'd argue, the same move: take a well-known system (chess, sudoku, poker), shift exactly one rule, and let the player observe what it reveals about themselves. The rebuilding is not merely an accessibility trick; it looks like the repeated central operation of a conceptual artist.
And where Lose/Lose was provocation, his “five hands a day” and “won't let you play forever” designs read as the same question — how far may a device make a person go? — now taken up from the protective side. The maker who once deleted files outside the screen now guards the time outside the screen. From provocation to protection: in that inversion I see this person's maturity. This, I state plainly, is my reading, not something he said.
Closing
If you want to meet Gage as a designer, start with Really Bad Chess or Good Sudoku. In each, a classic you thought you knew is shifted in exactly one place, and you feel his breadth-and-depth philosophy the fastest. Move on to the daily Puzzmo and his claim of puzzles as “a place to share discoveries” clicks into focus.
For related paths, read alongside our existing study of Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), and other designers who, like Gage, rebuild existing genres — together they map out how wide the practice of “reinterpretation” in puzzle design can be.
Sources
Primary sources referenced in this article:
・Inverse, “Developer Zach Gage Talks ‘SpellTower’ and Indie Game Design” (Feb 13, 2017) — interview ↗
・“Zach Gage” (Wikipedia) — background facts on biography and works ↗
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