atlantic-games

An unofficial Python client for The Atlantic's games: Bracket City, the Crossword, Caleb's Inferno and Rabbithole, plus the archives of Atlantic Trivia and Stacks, and your own saved games and stats.

The Atlantic doesn't publish documentation for these. This package wraps them in one client, sync and async, with typed Pydantic models. Optional extras add the atlg command line tool, an MCP server for AI agents, and a REST API. It's the sibling of nytimes-games and works the same way.

The crosswords are hosted by Amuse Labs' PuzzleMe, which does a great job of putting puzzles in front of more people on more sites. Thanks to them.

Installation

pip install atlantic-games

The package installs as atlantic-games and is imported as atlgames. Python 3.10 or newer is required.

Quick start

from atlgames import AtlanticGamesClient

client = AtlanticGamesClient()

client.bracket_city("2026-10-08").solved_text   # "Raytheon patents the microwave"
client.crossword("2026-10-10").entries()         # clues, answers, crossings
client.crossword(series="inferno")               # the latest Caleb's Inferno
client.rabbithole().questions                    # the latest Rabbithole chain

The async client has the same methods:

from atlgames import AsyncAtlanticGamesClient

async with AsyncAtlanticGamesClient() as client:
    puzzle = await client.bracket_city()

Your saved games need your Atlantic login cookie:

from atlgames.stats import bracket_city_stats

client = AtlanticGamesClient(cookies="atljwt6=...")

client.bracket_city_game("2026-10-11").data.totalKeystrokes
bracket_city_stats(client.bracket_city_games()).longest_streak

What's available

Puzzles don't need cookies. Everything about you does.

Puzzles

Dates are YYYY-MM-DD strings (or datetime.date) in New York time, which is when the puzzles change. With no date you get the latest puzzle. Unpublished puzzles aren't available early.

You (needs your atljwt6 cookie)

The Atlantic has no stats endpoint, so stats are computed from your saved games. Some things to know about saved games:

• Old games may not be there yet. The mobile app keeps your history on the phone and only uploads a puzzle when you open it while logged in. Open old dates in the app to bring them into your account.
• They're snapshots. The server keeps only the latest state of each game, and it can go backward: the app's "reset puzzle" button, replaying, or opening a date can replace a finished game with an empty one. Each result has fetched_at; keep your own copies if your history matters to you.
• solvedOnPubDate was only recorded from about August 2025, so None means unknown, not late.

The library is read-only. It never writes saved games.

Puzzle structure

puzzle = client.bracket_city("2026-10-11")

puzzle.clues()          # every clue: its text, answer, depth and the clues inside it
puzzle.available()      # the clues you can solve now
puzzle.render(["your + my", "ghost's exclamation"])   # the text with those clues solved
puzzle.steps()          # an order that solves it, innermost first
puzzle.solved_text      # the final text the game shows
puzzle.caption_matches  # False for the ~1 in 30 puzzles whose puzzleSolution differs

crossword = client.crossword("2026-10-10")
crossword.grid()        # rows of letters, None for black squares
crossword.entries()     # "1-Across": clue, answer, (row, col) squares, crossings
crossword.squares()

question = client.rabbithole().questions[0]
question.accepts("mark zuckerburg")   # Rabbithole's fuzzy answer matching

client.stacks("2025-06-17").rows()    # the solved Stacks board

Crossword files

Export crosswords to the formats other crossword apps use:

from atlgames import formats

puzzle = client.crossword("2026-10-10")
open("atlantic.puz", "wb").write(formats.to_puz(puzzle))   # Across Lite
formats.to_ipuz(puzzle)                                     # ipuz, as a dict
formats.to_xml(puzzle)                                      # Crossword Compiler XML
formats.export(puzzle, "ipuz")                              # any format, as bytes
formats.fidelity(puzzle, "puz")                             # what the format approximates

Clue formatting such as italics is dropped. Puzzles a format can't represent raise AtlanticGamesExportError with the reasons. Exported files are for personal use: the puzzles are The Atlantic's.

Cookies

Log in at theatlantic.com, open your browser's developer tools, and copy the atljwt6 cookie for .theatlantic.com (Application tab in Chrome, Storage tab in Firefox). It's httpOnly, so scripts on the page can't read it. Treat it like a password. It lasts 30 days; the site renews it as you browse, so you'll need to copy a fresh one about once a month.

cookies can be a Cookie header string, a dict, a Cookie-Editor JSON export (as a list or a JSON string), or the bare atljwt6 token. Only atljwt6 is needed; atljwt adds your subscription flags to account.

Cookies are only ever sent to The Atlantic's API, never to Amuse Labs or the puzzle file servers, and they never appear in errors or logs.

Your crossword progress is stored by Amuse Labs under your Atlantic user ID. That ID is read from your own cookie; the client has no way to ask for anyone else's.

Errors

Failed connections, rate limits and server errors are retried 3 times with exponential backoff, honoring Retry-After. Adjust with AtlanticGamesClient(retries=5, backoff=1.0, timeout=60), or pass your own httpx.Client / httpx.AsyncClient as http_client.

Command line

The cli extra installs atlg:

pip install "atlantic-games[cli]"

atlg bracket-city              # today's puzzle, no spoilers
atlg bracket-city 2026-10-08 --steps -a
atlg crossword yesterday --save crossword.puz
atlg crossword --series inferno
atlg rabbithole -a
atlg trivia last
atlg stacks 2025-06-17 -a
atlg list crossword --from 2026-10-01
atlg play bracket-city         # play in the terminal (nothing is saved to your account)
atlg play rabbithole

Answers are hidden unless you pass --answers / -a. Every command takes --format json|yaml|csv|table|value(FIELD,...), and dates can be YYYY-MM-DD, today, yesterday, a weekday name, first or last.

Your stats and history

atlg auth login --from-file cookies.json   # a Cookie-Editor export, or paste atljwt6 when prompted
atlg auth status
atlg today
atlg stats
atlg history bracket-city --from 2026-01-01

Cookies are stored in ~/.config/atlg/config.ini (mode 0600), with profiles for more than one account (--profile, atlg config profiles). ATLANTIC_COOKIES overrides the stored login.

Archiving

atlg archive bracket-city --from first --to today -o archive
atlg archive crossword --from 2026-01-01 -o archive --as puz

Archives write one file per date with a manifest, and resume where they left off.

MCP server for AI agents

The mcp extra installs atlg-mcp, a local Model Context Protocol server, so agents can play along: ask for a Bracket City nudge, check a Rabbithole answer, or export today's crossword.

# Claude Code
claude mcp add atlantic-games -- uvx --from "atlantic-games[mcp]" atlg-mcp

For other clients, add a stdio server with the command uvx and the arguments --from atlantic-games[mcp] atlg-mcp.

• Answers are hidden unless the agent asks for them, and the server tells agents to leave them hidden while you're solving.
• Your data uses the same login as atlg (atlg auth login, or ATLANTIC_COOKIES in the server's environment).
• Every tool is read-only except export_crossword, which only writes the file you ask for.

REST API

The api extra adds atlgames.api, a FastAPI app with every puzzle, your saved games and stats, and crossword downloads:

pip install "atlantic-games[api]"
uvicorn atlgames.api:app

Open /docs for the full list. A few routes:

Requests use the atljwt6 and atljwt cookies they're sent with; no other cookies are passed on. Mount atlgames.api.router in your own app, or start from examples/api for a Docker container.

How it works

The Atlantic's games come from four places, none of which need a login for puzzles:

• Bracket City puzzles are JSON files on CloudFront.
• Crosswords come from Amuse Labs' PuzzleMe pages. Their puzzle data is lightly scrambled; the client unscrambles it and, if Amuse Labs changes the scramble, reads the new one from their current JavaScript.
• Rabbithole, Trivia, the games hub and your saved games come from The Atlantic's GraphQL API.
• Stacks ended, and all its puzzles ship inside the game's own script.

docs/endpoints.md has the details: endpoints, schemas and quirks.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. A daily live check catches upstream changes.

License

MIT. This project isn't affiliated with The Atlantic or Amuse Labs. The puzzles belong to The Atlantic and their constructors.