Pocketful: Daily Puzzles

Pocketful is a pocket-sized collection of logic puzzles: fourteen free games, and a fresh daily set every morning that puts a twist on three random puzzles for you to learn!

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Inspiration

My wife is a Nancy Drew fan and really enjoys playing the games. She recently introduced those games to me and we have been playing them together since. Outside of the interesting and sometimes major plot twist stories that you get out of Nancy Drew games (iykyk), one feature that we both really enjoyed were the mini puzzles that would be spread throughout the story and games as a whole. This introduced me to new paper & pen like puzzles that I have never heard about, such as Nonograms and Takuzu. My wife and I became instantly hooked on these and we couldn't find a place anywhere that we could easily play all these types of puzzles on our phone without downloading multiple apps, and some games we just couldn't even find the puzzle game. That is when my wife gave me the idea to create an app that has all of our favorite puzzles that we enjoyed in Nancy Drew but also new paper and pen puzzle games that we found out about along our search. This ended up becoming Pocketful today.

What it does

Pocketful: Daily Puzzles is one calm app for people who love logic puzzles but hate juggling five bloated single-game apps.

  • 14 hand-built puzzle games, 10 of them free: Sudoku, Nonograms, Duets, Stars, Quilts, Bridges, Peeks, Pipes, Towers, Slink, and more.
  • A fresh daily set every morning. Same boards for everyone, in the difficulty you pick. Solve one to keep your streak.
  • Daily twists. Three games a day get a rule change, so a puzzle you know by heart plays differently for 24 hours.
  • Pocket the cat. Weekly stickers, milestone badges, and cat avatars unlock as you solve. The stickers ship as an iMessage pack, so your wins leave the app.
  • No lives, no timers, no pressure. Pocketful is meant to be a calm puzzle app where you don't need to worry about timers or lives. You can play at your own pace and come back if you want, all progress will be saved.

How we built it

  • Swift + SwiftUI, iOS 17+, a solo project shipped to the App Store in September. Built with the help of Claude Code as a pair programmer as I was new to Swift.
  • Every board is generated on device from a seed (game, tier, level, or date). Each game has its own generator plus a solver that proves the board has exactly one solution before it's allowed out. Generators are versioned so old boards never silently change.
  • RevenueCat powers the premium subscription: one premium entitlement, offerings drive the paywall, StoreKit 2 kept as a fallback.
  • AdMob rewarded ads are used for multiple different ad types. Interstitials between solves, bottom ad banner, and also rewarded ads for hints.
  • PostHog for anonymous, events-only analytics used to understand what puzzle games are popular and what frictions the app has.
  • An iMessage sticker extension that shares earned stickers for solving puzzles.

Challenges we ran into

Making a board unique was simpler but figuring out the right balance for the generated boards was a bit difficult because we wanted levels that could be solvable by deduction and no guessing. This took a bit of time tweaking the generator and play testing to make sure that it was working as we would expect. Retention was also a hard part to figure out. I assumed that giving users unlimited levels meant that they would just play more. Turns out that there needs to be a better incentive to keep users around, and that was to try and put more focus on the daily challenges. Still trying to figure out what keeps users and what drives them away.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Shipped 14 games, each with its own engine, difficulty ladder, tutorial, and a daily twist mode that required figuring out a balance of a fun new rule that still kept the main traits of the puzzle. I spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to explain the rules and spent a lot of time on the tutorial to make sure users would easily be able to understand the rules without having to read so much and make it something they could interact with.
  • Fun twists for every single puzzle in the app To give users a new perspective on their favorite puzzles I created twists for every single one with a new rule that gets users to think even harder. I think this makes this app different from other puzzle apps.
  • Deterministic dailies with a two-year archive. Because boards are seeded by date, every past daily exists without a server and its generation is efficient.
  • A fun side collectibles system for players: a set of weekly cat stickers already drawn and scheduled, plus an iMessage pack.

What we learned

  • The daily is the product. Retention comes from the daily set, not from the endless level tracks. I learned that providing infinite levels doesn't necessarily mean that users will always want to keep playing. There needs to be a sort of streak or other incentive to get users to feel like they want to play more each day.
  • You can build but distribution is what matters I found out that you can make as many cool features you like but at the end of the day no one will ever know about your app unless you have some sort of distribution. At an age with AI, the new wall to break through is now distribution because apps are coming out at a much faster rate driving up competition.
  • Every trial ships behind a flag. Every visual experiment kept its off switch, so if I notice that a UI change is not well received I could easily flip it back.
  • Read ad numbers carefully. A 40% click rate looked incredible until I saw it came from accidental taps on one placement.

What's next for Pocketful: Daily Puzzles

I still have more puzzle games that I would like to add, as well as fun themes for the upcoming holidays.

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