Launched a Little Puzzle Game – Here's the Story Behind It & I'd Love Your Feedback!

One night, my wife shared an old news story with me: the Wordle game (where players guess a five-letter word in limited tries) was bought by The New York Times. I was surprised that such a simple, old-style game caught the attention of a big company.

I casually replied, “I’d rather play a matchstick puzzle” - a childhood game where you move matchsticks to fix a math equation. Then I said, half-jokingly, “Why not create an online version for free?”

I had already built @Trangram , so I figured a small puzzle game would be easy. That night, while lying in bed, I started thinking about building a solver that could generate and solve matchstick puzzles automatically. My mind became so active I couldn't sleep. (Trust me, don't overthink at bedtime - it’s terrible for sleep and not my first time)

The next day, I finished the solver, it could generate tons of puzzles! But then I hit another issue: I couldn't just show random puzzles like most existing games. Without a sense of progression, players might find no difficulty and challenging.

Solving this took way longer than expected. I analyzed patterns across tens of thousands of puzzles. (By the way, AI didn’t help - despite prompting with detailed rules, they couldn’t even solve basic ones.)

After more than a week, I found a "sort of" solution. I say "sort of" because puzzle difficulty is subjective, it can be heavily influenced by the previous puzzles a player has solved. Still, I’m happy with the balance now and hope you feel the same.

For gameplay, I decided to keep the simple and consistent rule: Move 1 stick to fix the equation.

This keeps the focus on solving puzzles, and it also makes the UI much cleaner. Next came game flow, UI, and sound effects. I'm obsessed with clean, clear, responsive interfaces, just like how I designed @Trangram . At first, I tried some designs by mixing in RPG elements, like few examples below:

(All images, logos and icons are designed by @derek_liu_dev using @Trangram )

I really liked the feel, but after a few tests, I realized it was a bit distracting and pulled attention away from the puzzles. So I returned to the original matchstick concept. To keep it visually fun and support diversity, I used a rainbow color palette. I hope you find it elegant and charming.

Lastly, I want you to know this puzzle isn’t about testing or showing off your IQ. It’s really just about recognizing patterns in seven-segment display. To help you get familiar with the numbers, I created a Level Unlock stage, where you can play around by forming numbers with matchsticks before heading to next levels.

There are more things I haven’t mentioned here, but this post is already quite long. I hope you’ll give @Mathstick a try in your browser.

👉 https://www.trangram.com/games/mathstick

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback!