Pinteza

Guess the word of the day, then keep it: every Daily you solve becomes a collectible card.

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One word a day. A card to keep.

Pinteza turns a daily word puzzle into a collection you build. Everyone playing your edition gets the same word each day, and it changes length with the date: five, six or seven letters. When you solve it, the word doesn't vanish into a score. It becomes a card with its rarity, its theme and its meaning, and it stays in your Collection. Five free modes, no ads, and one optional purchase: a library of hand-picked puzzles. I built it on my own in Portugal, and it has been live on Google Play since 25 September, in 177 countries.

For judges: Pinteza in 60 seconds

  • Install: Pinteza on Google Play. Free, no ads, no account.
  • The Anthology in three taps: ••• menu > The Anthology > Volume I. The first three puzzles are free.
  • Test Plus: use a promo code from Additional info on a Google account that doesn't own Plus. On the shelf: Open the Anthology with Plus > UNLOCK PLUS > Redeem code on the Play sheet.
  • RevenueCat: Unity SDK, non-consumable pinteza_plus_lifetime, entitlement plus, price from the default offering.

How it plays

You get six guesses, or seven on seven-letter days. Green means the right letter in the right place, yellow means it's in the word somewhere else. Every tile that turns green plays its own note, one per column on a pentatonic scale, so a solved row climbs the scale and rings into the win.

Then the card arrives: Common, Uncommon, Rare or Legendary, with a theme and a short definition. Rarity comes from how often the word appears in real text, so a Legendary is a word you'll rarely meet. Your Collection keeps every card, sorted by rarity and filterable by theme, and you can share your grid without ever showing the word.

Five free modes

  • Daily: the shared word, the streak, the card.
  • Practice: unlimited boards at five, six or seven letters, or a surprise length.
  • Sprint: three words, one of each length, against a three-minute clock.
  • Chaos: one rule changes the game for everyone each week. There are seven, and each has its own animated mark and sound. Mirror, for one, reverses the word.
  • Duo: send a friend a match code and race on the same word, live. The fastest solve wins.

The words you solve in every free mode join your Collection too.

Coming back tomorrow

Every seven days of streak earns a Streak Shield, and you can hold two. Miss a day and a shield covers it automatically. Then there are daily missions, eight ranks and 49 achievements. You can make the game yours with board themes, keyboards, backgrounds, win effects, share frames and Duo expressions, unlocked with coins you earn by playing; Plus adds a Founder set.

The Anthology and Pinteza Plus

The free modes build the daily habit. The Anthology is for players who want a complete, curated journey: 20 themed volumes of 10 hand-picked puzzles, each volume ending with a Legendary word, 200 per edition and 600 across the three editions. It's presented as a private library. Cabinet doors open onto twenty crested book spines, each volume has its own page, and a finished volume is sealed in wax. The first three puzzles are free, so you can try the format before you pay.

Pinteza Plus unlocks all of it with one purchase: USD 7.99, EUR 7.99 or BRL 19.90. I set the prices per market by hand before launch, because a straight conversion would have put Brazil near R$50.

Why one purchase? A daily word game is a three-minute ritual, and ads or a monthly bill would spoil the calm that brings people back. So the daily game stays free and ad-free, and Plus sells something different: a finished campaign you work through at your own pace. Anthology boards award no XP and no coins, so money never buys rank.

RevenueCat's Unity SDK shows the offering's local price (the app never hardcodes one), opens the library only on a confirmed plus entitlement, and keeps access in sync through a customer-info listener that also handles refunds. No login: Restore purchases lives in Settings.

Details worth noticing

  • The reveal builds anticipation. Seven notes, one per column, so you hear a good row before you've read it. Under the Fog rule the hidden column always plays the same neutral sound, so your ears can't cheat.
  • The card turns a solve into a keepsake. The word lands on a cream card with a rarity pill, a theme and a serif definition, and a NEW ribbon the first time you find it.
  • The seal makes finishing a volume feel complete. Its sound fires slightly early so it lands exactly as the wax squashes.
  • Each Chaos rule announces itself. Every weekly rule has its own animated mark, and its sound lands on the mark's beat, like Storm's lightning bolt.
  • Duo starts as a duel. Two nameplates slam in, one hit each, and both phones count down together on the server clock.

Categories entered, and where to look

  • Best Game: the daily collection loop, plus four more free modes with different rhythms.
  • RevenueCat Design: the reveal you can hear, the card you keep, and the Anthology library.
  • HAMM: a complete free daily game, a three-puzzle sample, and a one-time premium campaign priced per market through RevenueCat.
  • Grand Prize: live since 25 September, three updates in the first week, creator distribution on top.
  • #BuildInPublic: #Shipaton posts since August. A narrow question to other builders became a tester lead.
  • Most Viral App (Noise): two product-led creator playbooks, 130 posts, 41,365 reported views.
  • Keep Them Coming Back (OneSignal): opt-in streak coaching in a Journey that branches on streak state, written in all three editions.
  • Growth Loop (Layers): an opt-in Layers SDK in the Play build, and a TikTok test that set my next experiment.

Built in Portugal, in three editions

English, European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. As a Portuguese developer, I wanted European Portuguese to feel native: its own Daily word, European copy, and rarity measured on a European Portuguese corpus. The two Portuguese editions share one word list, with the words only one country uses tagged to its edition.

What testing on real phones changed

Days before launch, a tester's older Android phone took guesses but never coloured a row. My phone and the editor were fine. A release-only notification setup failure was breaking the board on that phone. I made notifications best-effort, guarded the board against a missing answer, and confirmed the fix on that same device. Since then, every release gets tested on real phones, not just in the editor. Two-phone Duo tests later caught an upload overlay that looked like a lost connection and a solved row that stayed oversized. Both are fixed.

Since launch on 25 September

  • Three updates in the first week: 32-bit phone support, Duo rematches, Chaos and Duo fixes, and opt-in streak tips and usage statistics.
  • Noise: two creator playbooks reached 130 posts and 41,365 reported views (Noise dashboard, 1 Oct, 16:52 Lisbon).
  • OneSignal: a welcome Journey for players who turn on streak tips, live since 26 September. How I built it.
  • Layers: two European Portuguese TikTok creatives gave an inconclusive early response, so the next test leads with the collectible card.
  • Store pages: listings and 30-second trailers in all three languages.

What's next

  1. A card-first TikTok opening with the word and rarity held fixed, both posts compared at the same age, and a Layers tracking link to follow clicks through to installs.
  2. Measuring the step from the three free puzzles to Plus.
  3. iPhone and iPad, so a shared card or a Duo code works for friends on any phone.

Built with

Unity 6 and C# (the whole interface is built at runtime), RevenueCat, a Cloudflare Worker that serves the Daily, Firebase for Duo, analytics and crash reporting, OneSignal, Layers, and a Python pipeline that builds the word lists from openly licensed dictionaries.

Play Pinteza on Google Play · pinteza.app

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