Two things shipped today. The first is Rankle, the ninth Cyber-Jack app. The second is a games hub that sits above all three daily games now online. This is the studio's first time shipping two products in the same day, and the first time the portfolio feels like an actual product line rather than a collection.
Play Rankle at rankle.cyber-jack.uk, and browse all three games at games.cyber-jack.uk.
What Rankle is
You get four items: facts, objects, concepts, whatever. Your job is to order them from lowest to highest on some scale. A geography round might ask you to sort four countries by population. A science round might ask you to sort four chemicals by atomic weight. Sports, history, pop culture, all the same idea. You tap to swap items around. There is no time limit. You get one puzzle per day, same puzzle for everyone.
The share card shows your result as a block of coloured emoji. Three rounds correct is 3 blocks. One wrong is a red block. The visual is quick to scan and just vague enough that it is not spoiling the actual answer.
There are 55 puzzles in the pool now, covering geography, science, history, sports, pop culture, nature. The intent is a puzzle a day from the pool for the first two months, then cycle back if the game stays live. This is the opposite of Letterly and Cluster, which generate fresh content every day from rules. Rankle is a hand-curated daily pull, the way The New York Times crossword works.
Why ranking games, and why now
Letterly and Cluster came out five weeks ago. Both are word games, both are about working through letters or rules to find answers. Rankle is a different kind of thinking: spatial, comparative, logical. Three games, three different brain problems, all daily, all free, all shareable.
The real reason is the pattern. I got Letterly out in two weeks, Cluster out two weeks after that. By week five, the pipeline was smooth enough that a third game was obvious. Take the lessons from the first two - daily refresh, simple rules, share cards - and try a new game type. That is what Rankle is.
The games hub page
With three games live, the scatter of landing pages was starting to look messy. games.cyber-jack.uk pulls them under one roof. Pick a game, see what it is, try it, share it. There is also a leaderboard showing total score across all three games if you are logged into one of them and want a global score. Most people will just play one or all three and not think about logging in at all. That is fine.
The hub is also the front door for the next game, whatever that is. It is now easy to add game four without rebuilding the entire architecture.
The honest state
Three daily games, three different mechanics, all live, all free, all under a hundred plays a day combined. The low number is not surprising. Web games hit discovery problems that app store games do not have. You can build a beautiful game and it stays invisible unless people actively share it or you spend on marketing. The plan so far has been let the share card do the work. It is early.
If one of them becomes a habit for a meaningful number of people, that is the signal to think about monetisation, native apps, or other growth. For now the studio has three games in the wild and a pipeline for adding more. That is the milestone.
Numbers
- Rankle puzzles: 55
- Rankle build time: 3 days
- Games live: 3 (Letterly, Cluster, Rankle)
- Apps live: 4 (GutLedger, ListLedger, Rankle, Shoji)
- Web games built: 3
- Expo mobile apps: 4