Why Figgle has no lives, no timer, and no ads

I usually do bedtime in our household, which generally means bathtime, stories, and books. One evening my kids saw me playing the LinkedIn logic games on my phone, and it turned into a routine with my eldest to do them together before lights out. She liked the logic and I liked that she was doing something different.

While LinkedIn is a strange place for a bedtime game to live, the games are very well designed, surprisingly kid friendly, and can only be played once a day, so there is a natural built-in time limit. On the flip side, the apps actually made for kids are worse in every single way. They have countdown clocks, hearts that disappear if the kids think for too long, or ads that play the second they finish something, sometimes before they have had a chance to look at what they did. Apps marketed towards kids are generally full of dark patterns designed to drive engagement and keep them coming back to push up ad revenue.

So I made Figgle. It is logic puzzles with a new set every morning, close to the games we were already playing at bedtime but built for kids without all the crap.

Most of what makes it different is what I left out.

Firstly, there are no ads. I don’t really count an app as free if an ad network is paying for it by bidding on the attention of a seven-year-old. Figgle is free and on the App Store because I wanted it on the devices we already own, and TestFlight is not available on devices with parental controls (a topic for another blog post!).

There are no countdowns or time limits and a kid can sit and stare at the grid for ten minutes without the app having an opinion about it. My eldest does exactly that, and I have watched her get most of the way through one, go completely quiet, and then work out the last bit on her own. I don’t think she gets there with a clock ticking away in the corner. She just starts guessing instead. The only reason I track how long a game takes is to drive the difficulty curve.

There are no lives either and you can be wrong as many times as you like. I didn’t want a row of hearts emptying out every time she tried something, because what that teaches is that being wrong costs you, and being wrong is most of how you get through one of these. If a puzzle beats her she can put it down and come back to it after school and it will still be sitting there where she left it.

There is nothing to buy and no account to make, and it all works offline, so whatever they did last night stays on the device and it works the same in the back of a car as it does at home. I might charge for it at some point. If I do it will be a price a parent pays once, up front, and none of the rest of this changes, because I would much rather be building the thing a parent decided to pay for than the thing an ad network decided to pay for.

There are no streaks, so if you skip Tuesday then Wednesday still works. We miss nights all the time, usually because someone is overtired or we got in late, and I didn’t want the app keeping score of that on top of everything else, least of all over a puzzle she did in pyjamas.

All of these end up being the same thing really. Every one of them hands a kid a reason to stop thinking, and the thinking was the entire reason we were doing this in the first place.

Bedtime still looks the same as it did. Bath, stories, books, and then a puzzle before lights out, except now it is on something that was actually built for her.

If you have made something like this for your own kids, I keep a list of apps built by parents, and it costs nothing to be on it.