Stats

Adding public statistics to this game was a no-brainer. Beyond being a fun way to share a collective experience, from a game development point of view, statistics reveal patterns that you might otherwise miss.

How many people are actually engaging with the game?
Which boards are cleared consistently?
Which ones cause players to struggle or give up?

And on a meta level, tracking these things over time gives me a wider sense of how the game and its development are progressing.

I decided not to track global statistics for 'archived' days because I like the idea of each daily puzzle being a snapshot in time. Players can still earn 'personal bests' for archived puzzles, but those are private milestones. Because the game is in active development, this leads to some cases like there being virtually no statistics for the first four puzzles that were published, or high amounts of attempts on days when I was testing things. I don't see this as an issue though, it's just an artifact of what happened on that day.

The next public stat I plan to add is Tiles Cleared. The idea is to track how many tiles of each color are cleared on a given day. This is more of a 'fun' metric, but it could also reveal subtle patterns in player behavior. For example, if a board contains relatively few tiles of a certain color, yet that color shows unusually high clear counts, it might hint that people are prioritizing those tiles; maybe because clearing them early is part of the solution. It could also indicate repeated failed attempts where players try to get rid of a color early but then struggle to convert that into a full clear.