Puzzmo Blog

Daily Challenge Release

- Zach Gage Orta Therox

Happy Jubilee Week 2. We’re releasing Daily Challenges on Puzzmo!

The Daily Challenge widget for Wednesday, October 14. Six games are lined up: Cross|word, Ribbit, Flipart, Pile-Up Poker, Hue Complete Me and Bongo. As each game is completed it gets a checkmark, the streak ticks up from 12 to 13 days, and the 2, 4 and 6 game leaderboards switch from “Play N more to rank” to showing your rank and score, while the button moves on to the next game.

Our daily challenge is a series of 2, 4, or 6 puzzles, and we track your streak if you complete at least the first 2 of those puzzles. All puzzles in the challenge are unlocked for everyone (even if the game is experimental!) There are three leaderboards: one for the first 2 puzzles, one for the first 4 and one for all 6, plus a monthly board that adds up your points each day.

The 6-puzzle leaderboard is the only part that needs Puzzmo+ to see, but everyone who finishes it gets ranked, so new subscribers see their rank straight away.

If you play through the Daily Challenge widget, you don’t need to return to the today page to get to the next game, we’ll keep guiding you through the games from the end game screen. So, it’s a quick way to play a few games each day, which may, or may not include your favourites!

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The Daily Challenge is our shot at trying to solve a few scaling problems at once. When we launched the site three years ago we included some daily, weekly, and monthly combined leaderboards for “total daily score”. When there were only a few games on the site these made sense, but every time we add another game its meaner and meaner to the people who care about these leaderboards. We intend to launch a lot more games on Puzzmo and so we had to find a solution for these players. On top of that, with so many games on Puzzmo it can be hard to know what to play, or even sometimes be aware of all of what’s on the site. For old players,The Daily Challenge encourages you to dip back into games you grew out of, and for newer players, it encourages you to step a bit outside your comfort zone. We think it offers something good for everyone, and internally we’ve been enjoying it a lot.

If you’ve been playing on Puzzmo for a while you may also notice this system solves two other small problems:

The first is that Puzzmo points have always been a bit of a mess. It’s very difficult to balance different games against each-other in a way that feels fair, especially with some potentially very high scoring games like SpellTower in the mix. This change makes Puzzmo points entirely personal by taking them off the leaderboards. They’re still around as a metric to track your play (almost like experience), and you can still brag on discord when you pass 1,000,000, but they’re no longer a competitive element, and we think that’s an improvement.

The second is the ever expanding set of games which are used for competition with clubs. Now that we have a daily challenge, we’ve restricted group competition each day to just the 6 games in the daily challenge. It’ll still be important for your group to have a killer SpellTower ringer… just not every single day.

You’ll notice that The Daily Challenge does have a streak component, and although we’re not big on streaks and feel they’re a sort of unhealthy system, we feel like one prominent streak for the whole site is an acceptable and fun thing — but we’ll be paying close attention to how players are engaging with it. Just like our other (less prominent) streaks, you can always recover a lost streak by playing 3 days in a row.

We’ve thought a lot about this issue over the years and came up with many ideas, some of which we even tested out in small ways (like custom club leaderboards?), but we think we finally have a great answer here with The Daily Challenge. It’s simple to understand, fun to play, and has something for everyone.

– zach & orta