Most of what shows up here is the serious end of the workshop — the relay that moves your drops, the trip companion, the backup layer that keeps the copies honest. This week is lighter. We had a lot of mini-apps in flight at once, took a couple of days off the heavy lifting, and revived two small math games instead.
Why games
There's a stretch you hit when you're building several things at once where the days start to blur into one long run of the same kind of careful — the same auth, the same state machines, the same "what happens when this fails." Games are a good palate cleanser. They're small, they're finishable, and the only thing at stake is whether they're any fun. After a few weeks of safety nets, that's a real rest.
Two from the drawer
Neither of these is new, exactly. Both had an earlier life — versions we'd built a while back and set aside. We dug them out of the drawer, dusted them off, and rebuilt them clean on the same toolkit the rest of the family runs on. New paint, same bones. The history isn't worth dwelling on; the point is they were too good to leave in a drawer.
Domino Solver is a partition puzzle: a grid of numbered cells you carve into dominoes under a constraint, with a solver that shows you the cascade when you drop a tile and the rest of the board falls into place around it. Nine difficulty levels, a small daily warm-up.
Cat and Mouse is older still — a 19th-century pursuit game on an eleven-square board that John Conway, Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy analysed in Winning Ways. Three cats chase one mouse; the mouse moves first. Three computer opponents, the hardest of which plays the strategy from the book. It is harder than it looks, and losing to it is strangely satisfying.
Made with Chiu Chang
Both games are a small collaboration with the Chiu Chang Mathematics Education Foundation — people who've spent decades on math education and competition in the Chinese-speaking world. The apps are tiny, but the through-line is theirs: math you play rather than math you're taught. A partition puzzle is combinatorics with the lecture removed; a pursuit game is graph theory you can feel in your hands.
Both ship bilingual — English and 繁體中文 — and both keep the deeper strategy notes one sign-in away, so the game comes first and the lesson waits until you've had a few rounds to want it.
What a break is for
There's a version of this job where you never stop shipping the important thing. We don't think that version lasts. Building something with no stakes — where nobody's data is on the line and the failure mode is a puzzle that was too easy — resets something. You come back to the serious work with a clearer head and, usually, a small idea you wouldn't have had at the desk.
They're live now, free to play, no account needed to start. If you've got a few spare minutes and a fondness for small math, go lose to the cats a couple of times. We'll be back to the heavy lifting next week.
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