I played my own game for 100 consecutive days

Published on March 25, 2021

Beginning of January 2021, I released version 1.3 of my mobile game Bineroo.
The main feature of this latest release is the daily challenge. A new grid to play is randomly selected every day at 8 am (Spéracèdes Time). All players are notified and can play it for free.
The idea was to build a daily world competition and drive user engagement.
More in my previous post about this release.

In the beginning, I wanted to make sure everything was working correctly so I started playing the daily challenge every day. Slowly slowly, it became part of my daily morning routine (between breakfast and email check).

I was wondering how much I could play without getting bored (This is ultimately the case with any hyper-casual games if you ask me, even your own game, don't you agree?). In order to keep me motivated, I set a bar at 100 grids as a personal challenge.

And actually, it worked pretty well. I made it.

And this is how it looks when you assemble all the grids. Pretty cool, no?

Challenge: Rank the colors from the most to the least present using only your visual intuition (no counting ;)

The answer is not far below. Stay with me.

🎲 How is randomness doing?

As I mentioned above, a new grid is chosen randomly every day. The process is very simple. There are 4 sizes of grid (6x6, 8x8,10x10 and 12x12) and 4 levels of difficulty symbolized by a color (green, blue, orange and red). And for each combination of size and difficulty (16 possibilities you got it right ;), there are 100 grids available. This makes a total of 1600 grids.

To choose a new grid, we pick 3 random numbers:

• first one between 1 and 4 to select the size

• second one between 1 and 4 to select the difficulty

• third one between 1 and 100 to select the grid number for the selected size and difficulty

We make sure this grid combination (size-difficulty-number) has not been selected for a previous day. If it is ok, we go for it and notify all players about the new grid. And it is not ok, we replay the selection algorithm until we find a new grid that has never been played.

With 1600 possible grids, I will have exhausted all options in roughly 4 years. The exact date should be May, 27th, 2025. Save the date :)

So the question then is: when considering the 100 played grids, how is randomness doing at this point?

Let’s have a look at the distribution by size and difficulty

On the size dimension, this is not too bad (24 / 25 / 28 / 23)

On the difficulty dimension, this is a bit more chaotic (18/22/33/27). Mostly grids with a higher degree of difficulty (orange and red) have been selected from now.

Answer to the color challenge above:

Orange > Red > Blue > Green

Interesting to see that the combination size 6x6 and difficulty orange is an outlier in the table with 13 occurrences while all other combinations are between 3 and 7. Can we draw any conclusion? Not really. The sample of 100 grids is too small to do so. Maybe after 500 grids :|

📊 Personal stats

Here are my best times for these 100 grids.

And average times

There are definitely spaces for improvements, especially for the larger and more difficult levels.

And you? How are you doing?

I’d be very interested to hear about your personal results.