Launching MinCalc: five calm daily puzzles
April 29, 2026
MinCalc went live on 20 April 2026. Five daily puzzle games, a fresh one in each at 00:00 UTC, two minutes a day, no accounts. This is the post we should have written then; nine days late is better than never.
The site is built around a small idea: a daily puzzle should be the unhurried bit of your morning, not another notification competing for your attention. Open the page, pick a game, share the result if you want, come back tomorrow.
The five games
Each game has its own twist, its own colour, and its own shareable so a friend scrolling past your result in a group chat can tell which one you played at a glance.
- Targle — the target number is given. Find the six-character equation that hits it, in six guesses or fewer.
- Sumrex — place six rexes on a six-by-six grid whose digits sum to today's target. One per row, column, and coloured region. No two rexes touch.
- Quackle — drop ducks into a 7×7 pond so each region holds one connected flock and no two ducks from different ponds sit side by side.
- Toadle — guess the hidden four-letter word in ten tries. Each guess returns one number — a score, not a per-letter colour grid.
- Peerkle — order eight items from smallest to largest by some hidden measure. Five tries, one tile-locking step at a time.
What's actually built
Day one, the site shipped with:
- The full archive at /archive — every past puzzle is reachable. The home page calendar shows the month with completion status; the archive groups by month and by game.
- Daily puzzles for all five games. The whole world plays the same puzzle on the same date.
- A daily hints article for every puzzle, with progressive reveals so you can get unstuck without giving up the answer.
- Plain share strings — colour-distinct per game, no emoji barrage, no link-baiting. Friendly to a group chat.
- Anonymous play. Progress lives in your browser. No account, no email. The settings cog at the top of every page lets you reset any past puzzle without losing your streak.
Streaks exist because some players want them, but skipping a day costs nothing. There's more on the about page.
What's next
More games are queued. The five that exist today will keep refreshing every morning at 00:00 UTC for as long as the site does. That's the only commitment that matters.