Jam Cat How?

How does this site work? Peek behind the curtain.

JamCatWow is built and run by one person, so the machinery is deliberately simple. Here's the honest tour.

Where the puzzles come from

Every puzzle is generated ahead of time by a couple of Python scripts running on my own computer. The Anagrams generator picks each day's word using a rubric (enough letters to be interesting, enough answers to be fair), and the Numbers generator checks its own work: every goal number is guaranteed to be reachable before a puzzle ships. A scheduled job keeps a buffer of about ninety days of puzzles queued up, so the site keeps serving new games even when life gets busy. Which it does.

How a puzzle reaches you

Finished puzzles live in cloud storage, and the site fetches them through a small gate that only hands out the current window of days, so nobody can peek at tomorrow's word, including via clever URL guessing. New puzzles unlock at midnight Eastern, every day.

The site itself

The site is a SvelteKit app served from Cloudflare's edge. The games run entirely in your browser: your in-progress game, streaks, and stats are stored on your own device, which is why you can play without an account. Accounts exist for what's coming (archives, scoreboards) and are always free to create.

Sharing

When you share a score, the link carries only your results (never the answers), so the friend you're taunting gets a fair shot at beating you. That's the whole loop: play, share, wow.