Guides and data
Strategy write-ups and original analysis of our own games. Where we quote a number, we computed it against the word lists and level generators the games actually ship, and we say how.
All guides
- Every Minesweeper number pattern, with the proof behind each one - Named Minesweeper patterns are not a list to memorise. They are all corollaries of a single subtraction, and once you see it you can solve shapes nobody has named.
- How to solve a cryptogram, counted against a real puzzle bank - The usual advice tells you to try I first for a single-letter word. In our entire puzzle bank, a single-letter word is never I. Not once in 17 appearances.
- How our word search grids are built, and the three facts that make them faster to solve - The most repeated word search tip is to hunt for the rare letters. On a grid whose filler is uniformly random, that advice is close to backwards.
- We tested all 11,185 legal openers against Streakle's answer list - CRANE is the opener almost everyone recommends, including our own in-game tip. Against Streakle's actual answer pool it finishes 197th out of 11,185.
- Level 5 is the wall that decides your Streakle day, and the maths says so - Streakle gives you five guesses on the first word, four on the next three, and three on the fifth. We measured what that last cut costs a perfect player.
- Letter frequency in Streakle's answer pool, position by position - English letter frequency tables are built from prose. Five-letter puzzle answers do not behave like prose. Here is the real distribution.
- The four Minesweeper patterns that solve almost every daily board - Minesweeper looks like a game about luck. On our board sizes it is mostly a game about four patterns and one piece of arithmetic.
- FreeCell: the supermove formula, and why your first ten moves decide the game - Nearly every FreeCell loss traces back to the same mistake: filling free cells early, before you have anywhere to put the cards back.
- Water Sort gives you two empty vials and never more. Play accordingly - Easy, Medium and Large all give you exactly two empty vials. The colour count triples across those tiers, the workspace does not.
- Mahjong Solitaire: match the pair you can afford to lose - Every tile comes in a set of four. That single fact is the whole strategy, and almost nobody plays as though it were true.
- How to build a daily puzzle habit that survives a bad day - Most broken streaks are not failures of skill. They are failures of scheduling.