Puzzle and Games Publishers Editing and Proofreading Services

Puzzle and games publishing is the only branch of the trade where a single ambiguous word makes the product not merely worse but broken. A crossword clue with two defensible answers, a rule that two players read differently, a logic grid with a second solution — these are not stylistic complaints. The reader has spent forty minutes on something that cannot be completed, and they will write to tell you, at length, with a proof. Solvers and players are the most attentive readers in publishing and the least forgiving.

We edit what puzzle, crossword and games publishers produce — crossword clues and grids, cryptic clue conventions and house rules, logic and number puzzle sets, quiz and trivia questions with their answers, puzzle book front matter and instructions, difficulty rating and progression schemes, solution pages and their cross-checking, board and card game rulebooks, reference sheets and quick-start guides, component lists and setup instructions, edge case and FAQ documentation, playtesting feedback forms and reports, and localisation notes for games and puzzles crossing languages. Our editors test the writing against the way readers actually misread it.

The rulebook is the hardest thing in this category to write, because it must be readable by someone learning the game and consultable by someone mid-argument two hours in — and those are different documents fighting for the same pages. We structure rulebooks so the learning path runs first: setup, the shape of a turn, how the game ends, and a first-game walkthrough that a group can follow without reading ahead. Then reference material is separated out and organised for lookup rather than for reading, alphabetically or by component, because a player checking whether a card's effect triggers on discard does not want a narrative. We hunt specifically for the constructions that split tables: "may" versus "must" used interchangeably, "or" that could be inclusive, timing words like "then", "after" and "when" applied loosely, and any effect whose interaction with another effect is unstated. Every edge case a playtest surfaces belongs in the rules rather than in an FAQ published later, because the argument happens at the table where the FAQ is not.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished puzzles, prototypes and material under embargo. We are editors rather than puzzle constructors or game designers, and we do not verify that a puzzle has a unique solution or that a game is balanced — that must come from your testing. What we can do is make clues, questions and rules mean exactly one thing.