CrossEights x Colgate: A Custom Puzzle Experience for the Colgate Community
Today we're announcing something a little different: a partnership with Colgate University to bring a custom CrossEights experience to their community.
A new format is published today in the online Colgate Magazine — you can see it here — and in the print edition of the magazine, which is distributed to alumni, parents of students, and other members of the Colgate community.
The puzzle is co-branded and features two exclusive puzzles crafted specifically for Colgate. Each includes narrative hint paragraphs written around campus life: the campus, the sports teams, the liberal arts experience, and the arrival of spring.
This new partner version shifts from generic "vowel + consonant" hints to reveal letters to clues hidden in vignettes about campus life. Each solution word in the puzzle is directly referenced in the vignettes. These short passages about Colgate — campus imagery, athletics, student life — set the tone and reinforce the Colgate brand before even the first letter is played.
Why Colgate?
CrossEights is fundamentally a vocabulary and pattern-recognition puzzle — the kind of thing that fits naturally into a campus environment. The partnership started as a simple question: what would CrossEights look like if it were tailored to a specific community, with hints that actually speak to the people playing it? Colgate was the first to raise their hand.
This is our first partner deployment, and we're treating it as a learning exercise. If you're part of an organization — a school, a publication, a company — and you're interested in a branded CrossEights experience, contact us.