A word-puzzle game built by a 1998 Northwestern University graduate now draws about 10,000 players a day, Weisz told Northwestern Magazine in a profile published Tuesday, Sept. 1.
Sandy Weisz launched Raddle, a daily word-transformation game playable at raddle.quest, in March 2025. Players receive a starting word and an ending word, then build a chain of single-word changes between them. Cryptic clues hint at each step, but arrive out of order.
Weisz earned a computer science degree from Northwestern in 1998. He spent most of his college years designing for the student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, according to his Raddle website.
"I love word puzzles because they demand a different connection in your brain every day," Weisz told Northwestern Magazine. "It's a quick feedback loop: You see something. It's difficult. You solve it. You feel good. Repeat."
Weisz runs The Mystery League, a Chicago-based design studio he founded in 2014 that creates custom puzzle hunts for corporate clients. He has been making puzzles and games since he was a teenager, according to The Mystery League's website. He is a member of the National Puzzlers' League and has contributed puzzles to NPR's Sunday Puzzle.
The puzzle world knows him. Weisz served as editor-in-chief of the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt and has appeared in a monthly puzzle segment on WTTW's Chicago Tonight, according to The Mystery League's website.
In 2016, Weisz ran a puzzle hunt on Northwestern's Evanston campus as part of the One Book One Northwestern program. He gave himself a deadline of his 30th birthday to stage his first hunt, gathering friends for an outdoor event that went poorly in part because he held it outside in November, he told Northwestern Magazine.
Northwestern's official X account highlighted Weisz on Monday, Sept. 7, the same day Raddle featured a Northwestern-themed puzzle challenging players to transform the word NORTH into WESTERN in six steps.
On the puzzle page that day, Weisz wrote that he opens each new issue of the Northwestern alumni magazine looking for names he recognizes. "I'm thrilled to say that now I'm one of those names," he wrote.
