Introducing the Premium Puzzles Index

This is the first in a short series introducing the Premium Puzzles Index — a set of live charts we build in-house and refresh every single day. In this post we explain what the Index is and how to read the number at the top. In the ones that follow we’ll walk through each of the three charts underneath it.

 

A stock-market ticker, but for jigsaws

If you’ve ever glanced at a finance app and seen a single number that’s meant to sum up “how the market is doing today", you already understand the Premium Puzzles Index. We’ve borrowed that idea and pointed it at something far more enjoyable than shares: the global jigsaw puzzle market.

The big number at the top, sitting at 99.96 as we write this, is the whole market boiled down to one figure. We set it to exactly 100 on the day we launched the Index (11 June 2026) and let it move from there. Above 100 means puzzles, as a category, are running hotter than they were at launch. Below 100 means things have cooled off a touch. Right now we’re a whisker under, which is why the tag reads "contraction", though, by a rounding error, this is really a market treading water rather than falling.

Where the numbers come from

Here’s the part that makes this genuinely ours. Most shops guess at what’s popular from their own sales and leave it there. We go much wider. Every day, our system quietly reads the public web at large – the places where puzzles are sold, searched for, reviewed and talked about – and stitches those signals together into one consistent picture of the market. It’s a lot of moving parts pulled into a single, comparable measure.

Two ideas do most of the work. The first we call demand strength: a read on how briskly a puzzle is actually moving right now, drawn from how it’s ranking out in the wild based on sales numbers. The second is market scale: how large and established a title or brand is, which we gauge from the sheer weight of reviews it has gathered over time. One is the heat of the moment; the other is the size of the fire.

The six little tiles

Under the headline number sit six quick readings, and together they answer, "What kind of market is this today?” A couple are worth knowing: breadth tells you how many titles are gaining strength rather than fading – a broad rally is healthier than one or two giants carrying everyone. The top 7 share shows how much of the action the biggest sellers command; the lower it is, the more of a fair fight the market is. And brand concentration measures whether a handful of names dominate or the field is wide open.

You don’t need to memorise any of this. The point of the index is that you can glance at it and get an honest, independent sense of what’s happening across puzzles right now, not just what we happen to be selling this week.

What’s next

Underneath the headline live three charts, each answering a different question: which brands are winning, which individual puzzles are breaking out, and which countries are most puzzle-mad. We’ll take them one at a time over the next three posts. First up: Brand Dominance.