Daily puzzle games have an appetite. Every day needs a new one, and a pool of puzzles that felt huge at launch runs out faster than expected.
That happened to Rankle. Its pool ran dry and it started repeating old puzzles. The worst part is that a warning had been firing every single day for weeks beforehand. An alert that nobody acts on is just noise with a timestamp.
Paying for puzzles nobody plays
The quick fix was to get an AI service to write more. That works, and it costs very little per puzzle. But it is not nothing, and a burst of generation recently ran into a spending cap that also broke the answer checker on Letterly for a while. Paying to feed two games with a small audience, and putting the busiest game at risk to do it, is the wrong trade.
So the decision was to stop spending on them entirely.
Written and checked by hand instead
Instead of a paid service, the next stretch of puzzles was drafted in themed batches, like space, geography, history, nature, sport and everyday engineering. Every one was then checked by the same automatic gate that guards the live game: values in order, no near ties, no answers hidden in the labels, no puzzle that is basically a repeat of an older one. Anything unsure was looked up. A few dozen were cut in review for being too easy, too close to an existing puzzle, or dependent on how you define something.
Rankle now has fresh puzzles well into 2028. Cluster is covered into early 2028 too. The paid generators are still there, but they refuse to run unless someone deliberately says yes.
Fixing what was actually stopping people
While in there, a few less glamorous problems turned up. On a small phone, Rankle's results screen did not scroll, so the share button sat out of reach below the bottom of the screen. That has probably been quietly losing shares since launch. It is fixed now.
All three daily games also now point at each other. Finish one, and you see the other two with a tick if you have already played them today. A few days after that went in, Rankle had its busiest day ever. Still small numbers, but a real jump, and it came from people who were already playing something else.
The lesson for a tiny studio: content you own costs time once. Content you rent costs money forever.