Match 3 Daily Difficulty Curve Update

I have been thinking about the difficulty of Match 3 Daily. The game is tough. A lot of players will probably need at least a few hints to get through a board. I had one day last week where I cleared the board completely unaided, and it felt really satisfying. A lot of that satisfaction came from facing the previous days’ puzzles and pretty consistently needing to rely on hints to clear them. I still enjoyed playing the puzzles on those days, but the feeling of beating a puzzle on my own could only feel so rewarding because the game is challenging. That feeling is what I am trying to hone in on with the design of the game. And to that end, the game now supports boards with starting tile counts of less than 36.

Prior to my latest update, the main thing standing in the way of that was balance. I did not really have enough balancing levers in place to create easier puzzle days without changing the identity of the game too much. The base generator was built around a full 6x6 opening board, which means 36 tiles at the start, and while that structure works well, it also tends to push the game toward a consistently higher difficulty level.

I realized, both from creating my own boards and from seeing how much the hint system helps, that the simplest answer may be to remove the idea that every puzzle has to begin with all 36 spaces filled. I had also thought about other ways of balancing the game, like changing the number of tile colors or changing the number of rows and columns. But those options add a lot more technical overhead, and they also change the visual identity of the game more than I want to.

Using boards with fewer than 36 starting tiles feels like the best option not just because it is simpler, but because it fits the game naturally. Right when you open the landing page, the game already tells you how many tiles are on the board you are about to play. So if a puzzle starts with fewer tiles, players immediately get a clearer sense of what kind of challenge they are stepping into. It keeps the visual format consistent, but still adds more variation from day to day.

Even though using hints increases your likelihood of solving the day's puzzle, psychologically it’s always going to feel more rewarding to find the solution from its initial state. Having puzzles with fewer tiles should lead to more of the latter. Something I’m still considering now is how random I should make this, or whether to make the difficulty more structured, like how crossword puzzles increase in difficulty from Monday through the rest of the week.

Working through those design questions has been a lot simpler thanks to the custom puzzle editor I built for the game. It helped me a lot in figuring out why exactly a lot of the puzzles felt too consistently difficult to solve. In hindsight the answer is kind of obvious, but when you’re building something it’s easy to get a bit of tunnel vision and miss the simplest solution. For me that means getting stuck on this idea of the board always having to start with 36 tiles!

Match 3 Daily is still in active development, but I do feel that I’m getting very close to what I want for the finished product. I am leaning more toward the more structured difficulty curve I mentioned before, but for now I will continue creating my own puzzles and seeing what the puzzle generator puts out over the next week before making the decision.

If you’re interested in the custom puzzle editor, I do plan on releasing it, but first I want to bring more players to the game. The site does not currently get much traffic, but that is normal and expected at this stage. I have not done much to promote it yet, and honestly that has been helpful because it gives me some flexibility in how I test and iterate on the live version of the game. I am getting really close to the point where I will start sharing it around more, but for now I am happy to keep tweaking and documenting the process.

Today’s board, March 15, 2026, puzzle #58, is the first board that has less than 36 tiles. In this case, 27. It was custom made by me. Tomorrow’s puzzle will be the first board using updated generation logic that may (or may not!) generate a board with less than 36 tiles.

Enjoy!