The Calendar Puzzle

Daily puzzle game design & development

A daily puzzle game built into a calendar, so every day requires a different puzzle arrangement to be solved.

Some friends first played the puzzle in our favorite coffee shop in Brooklyn, and we quickly became obsessed with it. I made this app & web version so we could play it every day no matter where we were.

The game updates every day with a new version of the puzzle, and features a leaderboard with ranked completion time, an archive of past days, and multiple versions of the puzzle: Mini, Daily, and Weekday.

Each has a different board layout and pieces with varying complexity. Try to solve them all!

Made with help from Austin & friends. Play today's Calendar Puzzle ↗

close up photo of a person's hands while playing the physical calendar puzzle

photo of two people in a coffee shop, one playing the digital calendar puzzle game and one playing the physical game.

Photo of someone's hand holding up a phone with the calendar puzzle app open, showing the leaderboard page.

Photo of someone's hand holding up a phone with the calendar puzzle app open, showing the archive page.

Solver

I created a solver in order to find all of the possible solutions for each day's puzzle. The solver uses a backtracking algorithm to try and fit pieces onto the board in every possible arrangement until it finds a solution.

An intelligent hint system gives players the most effective clue based on the current state of their puzzle progress. It searches for all possible solutions and picks a 'hint' piece for the solution that most closely matches the user's active puzzle board.