Guides
How the games on Gamefinity work, written by the team that makes them: how a daily game is put together, how a score is checked, where some of our games came from and what they reward. Every number in them was checked against the code, data and records behind the site.
How a Gamefinity daily game is built
Every daily game on Gamefinity gives every player the same round for one New York day. This is how a day gets made, from the date to the puzzle on your screen.
How How Many's scenes are made
How Many shows you a bird's-eye snapshot for a few seconds and asks how many umbrellas, boats or birds were in it. None of those pictures is a photo. Each one is built item by item, and the count is exact.
How Quizette's questions are written, checked and dealt
Quizette asks ten trivia questions a day, the same for everyone. A trivia game is only as good as its questions, so this is how ours are written, checked, tested and put together into a day.
How we check every score by replaying it
A score on a Gamefinity leaderboard is not taken on trust. Our servers play the run again from your inputs and only keep the score if the replay ends exactly where yours did.
How The Daily picks its three games
The Daily is one ticket of three games, the same for everyone each day, with one attempt and one leaderboard. Here is how a day's three are chosen and how three different games become one score.
How leaderboards rank, and who wins a tie
Every game with a leaderboard on Gamefinity has several of them, and every board has to settle what happens when two players score the same. Here are the rules, as the code applies them.
Why you get one try a day
Our daily games give every player one go at each day's round. Here is why, how the rule works, and what happens when life gets in the way: a reload, a dead battery or a second tab.
Uncommet's Today's Fleet: what everyone else named
Finish a day's Uncommet mission and the final screen opens onto Today's Fleet: every other flight of the day, and what the day's players named for each prompt. Here is what it shows and how we keep it fair.
Why we rebuilt Pack It
Pack It, our physics packing game, had a good idea and a bad problem: it was far too easy. This is how we found out, what we measured and what we changed, in two rounds over two days.
Purrglar: from a prototype to a daily heist
Purrglar went from a one-page prototype to a daily game in about four days, and most of what makes it work came from taking things out. This is how it got its shape.
Thimbly: from hand-drawn charts to a daily of graded hoops
Thimbly started out as Stitch, a daily picture puzzle with hand-drawn charts. It stopped being a daily, learned to make its own puzzles, and came back as one under a new name. Each change came from a number.
Daily IQ: the puzzle types and how to approach them
Daily IQ deals ten reasoning puzzles a day, from two warm-ups to two genuinely hard ones. Each kind of puzzle has a short checklist that solves most of them. Here they are.
Mate in One: where the puzzles come from and how to score
Mate in One is 90 seconds of real chess positions, each with exactly one move that mates. The scoring rewards something different from what most players expect: not speed, but never missing.
GeoDrop: how the scoring works and where to aim
GeoDrop gives you eight places a day and a blank world map. Knowing how a pin's distance becomes points changes how you should play the 20 to 25 seconds you get for each.
How Uncommet scores a rare answer
In Uncommet any right answer counts, but the less known it is, the further your rocket flies. Here is exactly how an answer is scored, and what that means for how you play.