Daily puzzles are all the rage these days. We live in a post-Wordle landscape where around every corner you'll run into a new idea someone's come up with, many of them very interesting. Our own Thinky Dailies just wrapped up its first season, featuring dozens of unique puzzles that tell a charming hand-illustrated story when linked together.
The latest to throw their hat in the ring is Button Shy, the producers of tiny wallet-sized card games that represent some of the most compact offerings the in boardgames world, fitting big experiences into just 18 cards. I'm a fan and have covered their games a few times before. Their newest game The Daily Weather is on Kickstarter now, a solo-puzzle style card game that creates a new calendar-arrangement problem for you to solve every day:
The game uses a system of overlapping cards to single out a unique setup for each day of the year, and then provides you with a challenge to lay down cards and cover up symbols, leaving only today's date and the current "weather forecast" showing. There are additional scoring criteria that push you to find the most optimized setup you can which still fulfills the requirements.
Button Shy has slowly leaned more and more into the realm of solo games over the years, many of them ending up feeling like little physical puzzles on the table. I love an opportunity to solve something that doesn't involve staring at a screen, and many of their previous solo-playable games are quite thinky and quite popular: check out Sprawlopolis, ROVE, Count of the Nine Estates and Numbsters just to name a few.
The little wallets the games pack into are seriously tiny, and being able to very easily take the games with me in a pocket or tote bag means these are the games that I carry around most often — which leads to them actually getting played pretty often too.
You can pledge to receive The Daily Weather on Kickstarter now until February 14th. A few of the popular solo games I mentioned above are being offered as add-on orders, as well as a couple newer ones. (Revolver Noir is a 2-player only game, but I really love that one too.)
Shipping physical goods across the world is... not a very fun topic at the moment... and it's a struggle for smaller publishers to figure out how to handle international shipping, but there are a few options to reduce the cost if you're not in the US: in addition to the wallet version, the new game is available in a very cheap Print-and-Play format if you want to get digital files and do the physical part yourself. Some international fans also get together and do big group orders to save on shipping costs, and Button Shy suggests joining their discord to learn more.
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