Outguess

The rules take ten seconds: fire beats ice, ice beats water, water beats fire; same type, higher number wins. That is all of it.

What makes it hard is that both hands are face up. You can see every card your opponent holds, and they can see yours. Nobody is hiding anything, so exactly one job is left — read the order, and decide which round you are willing to lose.

The daily puzzle

One board a day, the same for everyone, one submission. Their five cards are laid out in a fixed order and you decide how to answer them. The result is shared as five squares and a score: you share the grid, not the answer.

Campaign, gauntlet and friend duels

The ladder runs 100 levels across seventeen personalities — the Mirror copies the type you last played, the Miser never wastes a seven, the Sphinx will not repeat a value. Climbing does not make the opponent stronger, it makes the board harder: a value gets banned, a specific card is removed, a clock goes on the round, or the opponent is dealt extra cards. The gauntlet is a separate mode — a run where your cards are the clock, and a win streak brings a used card back into the pool. For a friend duel you create a room and share a six digit code.

The game is written in React Native with Expo. The rules, the match state machine and the solver sit in their own pure TypeScript packages; the server is Fastify and PostgreSQL, and daily pool generation and scoring run there.

The daily board is not picked at random

Every daily board is filtered so that a perfect sweep is impossible and exactly one ordering is best. A solver that solves the game by backward induction does that filtering — each candidate board is solved, and the ones that fail the condition are thrown away.

The point is to make sure the interesting question is never “can I win them all” but “which round do I give away”. A randomly generated board cannot guarantee that.

Campaign opponents are personalities, not difficulty tiers

The personalities are behaviour patterns rather than difficulty steps: “never waste a seven”, “lead with fire”, “never repeat a value”. Beating one is about noticing the habit, not about reacting faster. The difficulty comes from the constraint placed on the board rather than from the opponent’s reflexes — the same personality on a board where sevens are banned is a completely different problem.

The only thing you can buy is Pro

No card packs, no loot boxes, no second currency, no real-money prizes. A one-time Pro unlock removes ads and opens the full analysis of any hand with its exact optimal line, the daily archive, unlimited puzzles and your statistics.

Got something similar?

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