Hints

Match 3 Daily puzzles are often really difficult. They can require from 7 to 13 moves to solve, and a lot of the available puzzles as of this post are in the 9-12 range. That means if you're having a hard time finding the right moves for the first few matches, you're really going to struggle to see through to the end.

I've made the hint system in a way that lets the user find the solution without it being given to them. Concretely, the amount of hints granted per board is equal to half the amount of moves in the solution, minus one. So if a board has 12 moves, you get 5 hints. There's also a hard cap that prevents any hints being granted after reaching halfway through the puzzle.

I explicitly do not do any kind of hint tracking as part of the statistics that the game presents. Finding the solution should feel as rewarding with or without the hints, so the reward of solving a puzzle without using hints is a personal accomplishment. While I may eventually tweak the difficulty of the game, I'm pretty happy with how the hint system fits within the overall design.