JetPunk Word Search - A Year of Searching

As many of you will know by now, JetPunk's Daily Word Search has come to an end after one whole year of daily puzzles. The response we have seen from this minigame was very positive, and the results (as you will soon see) were also very positive.

However, the time commitment to make these puzzles, without mistake, every single day was proving too difficult to maintain over a long time. Thus, this is why the word search had to come to an end.

And just how well did this minigame do? Well... Quickfire stats returns!

So, now we know some overall stats, let's find out the top puzzles in various categories!

What is obvious here is how far it had come from the start being lower and all the top days being in the final month! However, it should be noted that the first day (Feb 1st 2022) was only a half day, as it got released halfway through the day. And also several teething issues at the start meant lower takes.

With this in mind, the most/fewest takes for puzzles not in January or February was Tuesday 15th November 2022 with Capital Cities gaining 4,253 takes, and then Sunday 2nd October 2022 with 'Play' Languages, gaining only 1,970 takes.

This one is impossible to collate into a table, since only 1 puzzle ever had 10 words (Hidden Saturday on 30th April 2022), with a further 16 puzzles having 11 words. Then the 5 megas of course achieved the most words, with Mega Countries on 29th January 2023 achieving 90 words. Outside of the megas, two puzzles achieved 32 words, namely Geography Tuesday on 29th November 2022 and World Cup 2022 on 18th December 2022.

These are defined by how many users achieved 100%. If you did not find all the words, then your score was submitted based on however many you found that day, providing you found at least 1 word.

All 5 of the easiest puzzles were on Mondays. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the theme for Monday was always "Easy Monday". This meant there were never backwards words, and generally smaller puzzles. Palindromes being the easiest is also unsurprising, as it's very easy to spot the words because they are reflective.

The hardest puzzles were all Saturday's, since you didn't know how many words each puzzle had. To add to this, most of these puzzles were larger Saturday puzzles and also all of them had "embedded" words. Saturday puzzles were the only ones where "embeddings" were allowed, and this meant that a word was entirely contained within another. For example if the puzzle contained "Somalia", then it also contains "Mali" inside that. This tripped a lot of people up early on, but most learnt to look for them eventually.

Now we come to the part many have been waiting for - the best players of Word Search. Now, "best" here should come with the very important connotation of "commited", since playing every single day for 365 days in a row is a serious feat! Without further ado...

Below are the top 20 players by score. I have a full list of the top 100, which is too long to show here, but if you achieved 6538 or more words I can lookup your position for you.

As noted before, 11 players attempted every single word search JetPunk's minigame offered to them. While we know 3 of these users for sure, since they found every word, who are the other 8? In fact, many are in the top 20 above, but 3 are not (score and rank given after)! The 11 users who attempted every single grid are:

Aficionado, DiscoBayGolfer (#30 - 6857 words), Elboy, Kesa1979, lele20 (#31 - 6851 words), MiaTheGoose, NonoMcNono783 (#21 - 6912 words), peakguru, Simon1006, Stewart and Vicky.

Now we come to the fastest players. Those that consider themselves speed maestros at completing the Word Search. This is calculated as the time taken for the first person to complete the puzzle that day, since you could leave the page and come back, it meant that this was the only accurate way of timing it. The fastest time for first completions were:

As you can see, this leaderboard was dominated by Liam. In fact, see the chart below to see just how many word searches Liam was the first to complete! Only those with 4 or more wins are included.

So what other stats can I pull out? Well here's a chart of all the takes of all the word searches by day:

And another one showing the takes by day of the week:

And then this one shows the number of puzzles that have the number of words:

And another one showing the number of unique people who completed that many word searches total:

I was really happy with this graph, because it so clearly shows such a smooth pattern, showing how people naturally taper off in interest.

And now, enjoy just a list of other stats I acquired. If you think of more ideas feel free to let me know and I'll consider adding them!