Totle
Totle, daily math puzzle game; Saturday puzzles have the fewest answers My oldest two kids are off to college and since leaving we've been playing the Wordle and 'sharing' our solutions with each other. It's been a fun way to stay connected with them, and it's become a bit of a challenge to see if we can beat each other's solutions. This got me thinking about other ways I could connect with them. The thing about the Wordle is that it doesn't take a large commitment of time, you can just pull it out when you've a few spare minutes. So I set out to build a game that would borrow from many of the themes that keep pulling us back to Wordle. What I created is called Tōtle which fits another one of our (okay my) favorite things; Dad jokes and puns (as it’s pronounced total). Here's how it works. You get five different numbers from a number pool 1 to 20, and a target from the remaining pool. Combine two at a time with + − × ÷, using all five numbers, every result a positive whole number, each puzzle always takes 4 moves. You get 3 rounds and 4 undos per round; a medal for fewest moves (perfect 4 = crown). There's a spoiler-free share card, like Wordle’s grid. The combinatorics math works out like this: C(20,5) (that's choose 5 from 20) × 15 possible target numbers = 232,560 possible puzzles. An interesting side quest: exhaustive search discovered that exactly 6 can’t be solved. They all are from the group of 6 numbers: 3, 7, 16, 17, 19, 20. If any one of those is chosen as the target the other 5 cannot make the target. I'm not sure if there are any interesting reasons or patterns. Every puzzle was sorted into 7 difficulty bands, by how many solutions each has, to provide a way to add increasing difficulty along the week. Sunday draws from the easiest 30%, Saturday from the hardest 3%, the game shows “harder than X% of puzzles” on the hardest days; Saturdays so far have been in the 98th–99th percentile of difficulty. 5 Saturdays were discovered to have exactly one answer (answer here means ways that only regroup or reorder the same moves count as one); the first is #68, Saturday, December 19, 2026. A few things I'd love to know from y'all: Difficulty: does the Sunday-to-Saturday curve feel right, and are Saturdays too hard? I've experimented with a mode that offers some help. But it's still under development. First-time play: was anything confusing, like dragging vs. tapping or how rounds work? Phones: How does it play on your phone vs your computer?