No one has done more in recent years to bring puzzle culture into the mainstream than The New York Times. No one, that is, except Taylor Swift.
Famed Scrabble and numerology enthusiast Swift has turned her most ardent fans into detectives who scour her words, outfits, music videos and body language for clues about what she might do next. From the earliest days of her music career, when she hid secret messages inside liner notes, Swift has gamified fandom in a way that’s hooked millions of players worldwide.
These puzzles and games have largely been informal and based on her dropping hints for fans to pick up and run with. But last year, one fan decided to formalize the game playing, and ever since, the Swifties have been flocking to play.
Around six months ago, I noticed a new trend in my social media feeds. Where once I’d see people posting their daily Wordle and Connections results, they were now posting scores from a game called Mastermind. Screenshots featured outfits that I, as a fan, recognized as being worn by Swift during the Eras Tour. On further investigation, I discovered that Mastermind could be found within the Swift Alert app — a masterstroke in fan service by North Carolina-based Kyle Mumma and his wife.
After attending the Eras Tour March 2023 opening night in Glendale, Arizona, the pair found themselves doing what many Swifties do: tuning in to a grainy livestream to watch the show play out night after night. Mumma realized that as the show started to move, first around the country and then around the world, it was hard to keep track of the starting time and the point of the show when Swift plays her two nightly surprise songs — a much-anticipated highlight for fans, whether they’re in attendance or not.
The idea for the Swift Alert app, which would ping people at showtimes no matter where they lived, came from the hosts of the Every Single Album podcast, which Mumma was listening to while walking his dog. With a background in software, he thought it wouldn’t be too hard to build. So within 24 hours he’d recruited a young engineer from Turkey and they set to work.
Swift Alert went live in August 2023 just before the Mexico City shows, during which Mumma sat up until 2 a.m. sending out alerts to the 20 to 30 users who’d stumbled on the app in the App Store. “I was kind of like, What am I doing?” he told me over Zoom.
It was during the shows in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in November that things really began to take off. Going into that weekend, the app had around 200 users. By the end, it had been downloaded about 150,000 times. Mumma credits a couple of big Swiftie TikTok accounts for the app’s overnight viral success.
Over time, Mumma and his tiny team took suggestions to add more features to the app, including a calendar, a newsfeed and some quizzes. “A surprise-song tracker was a very early request,” he said. Then, just before the Tokyo shows in February this year, they added Mastermind to the app.
How the Taylor Swift Mastermind game works
The way the game works is that ahead of every show, people can guess which outfit variations Swift will wear that evening (for most sets she has multiple options) and what the surprise songs will be, as well as predict what color guitar she’ll play and other variables that Mumma introduces based on fan theories about the shows.
I can’t wait to see how I’m going to be wrong this week.
This is how, on the evening of June 7, as I delightedly watched Swift materialize before my eyes from below her sunset-hued fronds in an unseasonably chilly Edinburgh, Scotland, I found a small part of my brain clock a six-point loss for not guessing the Lover bodysuit correctly.
That night, I got my very worst Mastermind score ever, a measly 27 out of a possible 208 points. I can’t say I came away feeling disappointed though — I did get to see Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve live, after all. I’m also consistently terrible at the game, even though I play it more religiously than I do Wordle and Connections, which I’m comparatively good at.
Thanks to social media, I know I’m not alone in checking my Mastermind scores while actually in attendance at the Eras Tour, but ticket holders aren’t the game’s primary intended audience. Really, it’s for the people sitting at home, who aren’t there that night — or indeed any night. I know from playing the game before the Eras Tour arrived in the UK that it made me feel connected to what was happening on stage every evening, and to the global fan community.
Mumma is proud that the game now has players in every single country (that Google Analytics tracks), including places the Eras Tour will never visit. “We’ve got a user in Ghana comparing scores with a user in Cambodia, and that was not ever really something that we anticipated,” he said.
On X, I saw a user joke that one day someone is going to appear on the leaderboard, which is displayed on the app after every show, with a perfect score and it will turn out to be Swift herself. It’s doubtful that she’s unaware of the game’s existence by now, but she has yet to acknowledge it.
A rallying point for Swifties
It’s fair to say that Swift has slowly taken several steps back from the places she previously lurked on the internet over the past few years, which is absolutely her prerogative. On several occasions, people whose posts the star has liked on social platforms have retroactively edited them to make it seem as though Swift is favoriting messages she’s in fact never seen. In light of this, it’s easy to assume that these platforms no longer feel like safe spaces for her to casually interact with fans.
In her absence, the online fandom has lacked a central point around which to rally, but Mastermind has been something of a unifying force. The night of that first show in Edinburgh, the game crossed 100,000 players for the first time, and with every Eras Tour concert, it continues to grow.
Even when I’m right, I’m wrong.
There have been times when the overwhelming increase in players has nearly toppled the app (in fact, on that first night in Tokyo, Mastermind crashed and all scores were lost). But Mumma and his initial team of four, which also includes a social media person, has managed the swelling number of users adeptly. The app remains free and there are no ads or data collection. You can choose to pay a one-off $2 fee, which helps keep the lights on, but the project remains a bit of fun, not a business.
“It’s meant to be a space for people to have fun, play a game and enjoy this incredible tour and incredible artist,” said Mumma. It’s remained his priority throughout that Swift Alert and Mastermind should show it’s possible to make tech products “that make the world better.”
As for what’s ahead for Swift Alert and Mastermind when the Eras Tour draws to a close in December, Mumma doesn’t yet know. The entire experience is designed around the tour, he said, and therefore it’s hard to envisage how it might evolve. “If I had it my way, she would just tour forever, and we could do this forever, because we’re having a blast.”
Between now and then, Mumma and his team will keep the game going as growing hordes of Swifties place their bets and then hold their breath only to learn that they’ve once again guessed the surprise songs wrong.
I’ve learned so much from playing Mastermind, but it all boils down to this: If you think you know what Swift is going to do next, no you don’t. You shouldn’t trust anyone who claims to either. She’s two, three, four moves ahead of us at all times. We might love the game, but she’s the one true mastermind — and that’s what keeps it fun.
