How we make games

Eigengames has 28 games. 13 of them are our own designs: Tilt, Flapjack, Twist, Seesaw, Burst, Eyeball, Putt, Mix, Odd Coin, Fold, Ferry, Tempo and Count Rush. This page is about how those are made, and why you can trust a par, a daily puzzle or a leaderboard here.

One idea, one gesture

Every original starts as a single rule you can learn in ten seconds: tilt the board and everything slides; flip a pancake and everything above it flips too; a drop grows a bubble until it bursts. If the rule needs a paragraph, it is not ready. A round should fit in a coffee break, and there should be a reason to come back tomorrow.

A generator and a solver for every puzzle

The daily puzzle is not picked from a list. A generator builds it from the date, so everyone in the world gets the same one. Before you see it, a solver plays it: a search over every reachable position for Tilt, Flapjack and Twist, a robot that tries shots every few degrees for each hole of Putt, an exhaustive check of every arrangement for Seesaw. Puzzles that are unsolvable, trivial or too hard for their level are thrown away. That is why a par here is a number a program actually achieved, not a guess.

Tests, then play

The rules of every game live in a small module without any graphics, and that module has automated tests: the rules themselves, the solver's answer on hand-checked cases, and that the same date always gives the same puzzle. On top of that, every game is played to the end on a phone-sized screen and on a desktop by a test script that taps, swipes and types like a person, after every change. When it finds something, we fix it before it goes live.

Keeping it fair

A game is only fair if the only way to win is to play it. Twice we found that a quick game gave its answer away: in Count Rush the right number tended to sit on a middle button, and later the spacing of the buttons gave it away; in Number Rush the last digit did. We measured both, rebuilt how the options are made, and added tests that fail if the answer ever leaks through position or spacing again. Hints are optional and marked: a puzzle solved with a reveal does not go on the leaderboard.

Strategy guides from our own numbers

Each game has a strategy guide. The numbers in them come from running the games' own code: thousands of generated puzzles, bots playing each other, solvers comparing strategies. Each guide says how its numbers were measured, and where an idea comes from outside (pancake sorting, the mathematics of four in a row), it links the source.

The tools we use

We are a small team and we use AI coding tools to write and test code, and an AI model drafts the clues of the mini crosswords, which our script then checks. Every game, puzzle generator and guide is reviewed, measured and played before it is published, and we are responsible for all of it. If you find a mistake — a wrong clue, an unfair puzzle, a number in a guide that does not hold — tell us at hello@eigengames.com and we will fix it.

What we do not do