Game
I took the glow off everything else.
A logic puzzle built on Simon Tatham's Magnets. Every puzzle has exactly one solution, and you can reach it without guessing. Play one below.
- The problem
- Early versions looked AI-made, because every element had a shadow, a gradient or a glow.
- What I built
- A daily logic puzzle where every puzzle has one solution, with no server behind it.
- The result
- You can play today's puzzle on this page. The Google Play release is still to come.
How I built it
The problem
It looked like AI made it.
Early versions got the same note twice: it seems very AI-ish. No single choice was wrong. Every element had a shadow, a gradient or a glow.
That was the actual problem. When everything has depth, depth stops meaning anything. The board couldn't sit in front of the page, because everything was already floating.
The fix
Scarcity is what reads as depth.
The fix was one rule: nothing glows except a placed magnet. Surfaces are flat and matte, corners are square, lines are engraved at 1px, and only magnets get a radius, because only they are moulded objects.
The rules of play got the same restraint. Forced blanks aren't auto-filled, satisfied clues don't get a tick, and a days-played counter replaces a streak that punishes a missed day.
What I built
Someone had already solved the hard part.
Tatham's puzzle engine is C and MIT-licensed. Rewriting it would have been weeks spent re-creating solved problems. I compiled it to WebAssembly instead, wrapped it in React, and packaged it with the same Capacitor pipeline that had already got another app through Play review.
Generation is fast enough that there is no puzzle bank and no backend. The phone generates the daily puzzle from the date.
Play it here
Today's puzzle, live.
This is the real build, embedded. Tap a domino to place a magnet. The numbers on the edges count the plus and minus poles in each row and column.
What is not done yet
It isn't on the Play Store yet.
The game works. What's left is release work.
- Not yet released on Google Play. The web build above is where it stands today.
- Tactile polish is next: sound, haptics and placement animation.
- The guided first puzzle is the riskiest screen. Magnets asks for four concepts before the first tap, and that screen needs testing with people who have never played.