Why there is no daily checklist

Puzzle Lantern starts with a small catalogue and is designed to grow towards a hundred games. That one number settled an early design question for us, and it settled it in a way that is not going to change: there is no daily checklist, and there is nothing in the app that asks you to finish the set.

The arithmetic of a growing collection

Imagine the version of the app that keeps a tally. On a quiet launch day it reads three of three, which feels tidy. Add a game and it reads three of four, which is a small, polite nag. Carry that forward to fifty games, and then to a hundred, and the very same tally now states, as a number, everything you did not get round to. Nothing about the tally changed. The collection grew around it, and a pleasant habit turned into a running total of things left undone.

A new game should be an offer. Once anything counts across the whole catalogue, a new game is also a new empty box on your day, and every release quietly makes yesterday’s habit harder to keep. That is the trade we were not willing to make, so the counting was left out instead.

Adding a game should make the collection more inviting. It should never make the habit heavier.

What is deliberately missing

These are not gaps we ran out of time to fill. Each one was considered and turned down, and the rule is written into the product definition so that a later release cannot slip it back in:

• No “X of Y completed”, anywhere. Not on Home, not on a game page, not in your statistics.
• No combined score across games. Sudoku keeps its own results, Vanish keeps its own, and a grid and a hand of cards were never going to add up to a single meaningful figure.
• No Clean Sweep, no Perfect Day, no badge for having played everything on offer.
• No reward for playing every Daily today, and no gentle reminder that you could have.

What Home shows instead

Home is a personalised selection rather than an inventory of everything you have not touched. It leads with your favourites, the games you played recently, and today’s Dailies for the games you follow. If two games out of a hundred are the ones you actually enjoy, Home is about those two, and the other ninety-eight are not presented as homework. The full catalogue lives in All Games, which is there for the evenings when you feel like browsing, and which is perfectly happy to be ignored the rest of the time.

Each card carries the state of its own Daily and nothing more. Today it is new, in progress, or played. Three plain states, one per game, with no total sitting underneath them.

One streak, kept by one puzzle

There is a single overall activity streak, and any one Daily keeps it alive. Solve the Sudoku on the bus and the day counts. Play nothing but Recall for a fortnight and every one of those days counts too. The streak notices that you came by, not how much of the catalogue you got through, which is why it does not become harder to keep as the collection grows.

More puzzles sits outside all of this. It is unlimited, it is there whether or not you have played today’s Daily, and it touches neither your Daily results nor the streak. It exists for the evening when one puzzle was not quite enough, and for the day when you would rather play something with no date attached to it at all.

The short version: we would rather you played one puzzle you fancied than three you felt you owed someone. A daily ritual survives being skipped. A checklist does not.