A single puzzle gets stale in about three weeks. Nine games on a rotation is what makes a daily habit survivable — and it makes the ability profile meaningful.
When we started, the obvious plan was to build one excellent puzzle and ship it. We talked ourselves out of that in about a week, and the reason was boredom.
Not our boredom — the player's. A daily habit built on a single game type has a failure mode, and it arrives reliably somewhere around week three.
One game is a very narrow habit
If your daily is always Sudoku, then on the day you do not feel like Sudoku you do not play. The habit has exactly one on-ramp and it closes easily.
Nine games give the habit nine on-ramps. The day you do not feel like Sudoku is a Minesweeper day, and you still show up.
Nine games make the profile mean something
A single score tells you whether you are good at Sudoku. Nine games, each weighted across six cognitive dimensions, tell you something closer to a shape — where you are strong and where you are not.
That shape is the part of the product we find most interesting, and it only exists because the rotation is broad.
The cost is real, and we pay it
Nine games means nine engines to maintain, nine balance passes and nine sets of bugs. It is roughly nine times the work of one game, and there are days we feel every bit of it.
We still think it is the right trade. A puzzle site that survives three months beats a perfect puzzle that survives three weeks.
FAQ
Will you add more games?
Slowly. Each new game adds maintenance cost and dilutes the rotation, so we only add one when it exercises a dimension the current nine do not cover well.