Reading the Index: The Market Map

Third in our series on the Premium Puzzles Index. We’ve looked at the headline number and at how whole brands stack up. Now we drop down to the level of the individual puzzle: the Market Map.

Every title, all at once

If Brand Dominance is the view from altitude, the Market Map is boots on the ground. Here, every single puzzle we track gets its own dot (dozens upon dozens of them) plotted on the same two ideas you now know well. Left to right is demand strength (how hot a title is selling right now); bottom to top is market scale (how many reviews it has amassed, i.e., how proven it is).

Two extra details are packed into each dot. Its size reflects the puzzle’s price (bigger dots are the pricier boxes), and its colour tells you which brand it belongs to. So at a glance you can spot not just where a puzzle sits but also whether the expensive titles or the affordable ones are the ones catching fire and which brands own which neighbourhoods of the map.

Four corners, four stories

We’ve divided the map into quarters, and each corner tells a different tale:

Top-right: the Dominators. Big and hot: proven best-sellers that are still selling hard. These are the safe bets, the puzzles that have earned their reputation and are living up to it today.

Bottom-right: the Breakouts. Selling briskly but without a long track record yet. This is the most exciting corner: the newcomers and sleeper hits that are taking off right now, before the crowd has fully noticed. If you like getting there first, browse here.

Top-left: the Fading Giants. Famous, heavily reviewed titles whose day-to-day demand has cooled. Often still wonderful puzzles, just past their peak of hype, and sometimes quietly heading for retirement.

Bottom-left: the Long Tail. The quieter, more specialised titles. Not blockbusters, but this is exactly where niche gems and acquired tastes live.

The little league table

Just beneath the map you’ll see a short ranking of brands with scores hovering around 100: Magic Puzzle Company and Clementoni out in front, and so on. Think of these as each brand’s current “form” rating: 100 is a steady, average performance, and the leaders are the brands whose titles are collectively running a little hotter than the pack this week. It’s the same idea as the headline Index, applied brand by brand.

How to use it

The Market Map rewards a slow look. Chasing something new and buzzy? Start bottom-right. Want a dead-cert crowd-pleaser? Top-right. Hunting for an underappreciated favourite? The left side is your friend. And because we redraw the whole thing daily from signals right across the public web, a puzzle drifting rightward over a few days is a genuinely early sign that something is catching on.

One chart left in the series, and it’s the one that zooms all the way out, from single puzzles to whole countries. Next time: Where the World Puzzles.