Best Puzzle App I’ve Used

I downloaded this app last year and spent a few months with no subscription. I was able to accumulate tons of coins (which are used to give hints in puzzles) and a decent amount of tokens (which are used to play a puzzle). About a month or two ago, I decided to pay for the annual subscription to get rid of the ads, and it did, which is GREAT! Also, all of the daily puzzles are free with subscription and you get to play five special issues for free per day (any more than that and it costs you tokens). I really appreciate the range of puzzles this app offers, unlike a lot of other apps. I’ve gotten better at puzzles I didn’t enjoy or know how to play earlier, like killer sudoku (which is still tough), but the instructions for each puzzle are very clear. I also like that the player can choose which difficulty they want to play a puzzle if they are still learning or haven’t mastered that puzzle type yet. The special issues are GREAT since they’re great practice...I don’t know if I’ll ever complete all of them! I also love that the developers are always adding new puzzles and new issues, which keeps the app fresh and never boring. I use this app every day to keep my mind sharp and I absolutely love it!

You don’t get what you pay for.

After using this app for several months, I decided to buy the subscription to avoid having to watch ads to earn tokens. On the plus side, there are lots of puzzles to choose from. Unfortunately though you don’t get unlimited access to your favorite puzzles in the special issues. For these puzzles you have to use “keys”, and you only get 5-10 keys per day. You can use earned tokens to pay for more puzzles, but you receive fewer tokens the more puzzles you play. For example, for some puzzles I now only earn tokens after I complete 100 of them. If you run out of tokens and want to continue with your favorites, you have to go back to watching ads or paying for tokens. Some of my favorite puzzles are only posted once per week on the daily pages, so this is very disappointing and also very upsetting since I paid for the subscription. On the plus side, I can go back to previous issues to play my favorites, so I am doing that now. I expect though that I will work my way through those pretty quickly. After that, I see no reason to continue with the subscription. I understand that developers are trying to make money, but when you try to squeeze more money out of customers who have already paid for the service, your customers are going to resent that and not come back. I feel cheated, and I will be one of the customers moving on to other apps when my yearly subscription ends.

Good

For the most part I love this app. I play it everyday, and I love that as long as I don’t mind watching ads I can keep up with the daily puzzles and even do a few of the special issues once in a while. I have a very tight budget so subscriptions to games are not something I can afford. However, a few programming changes they’ve made recently are a bit annoying, and one of them I think might actually be a bug. 1. After finishing a puzzle and getting the reward screen I don’t like how it sometimes kicks you out of the page you were on all the way back to the main daily page calendar. This seems to only happen when you complete a “quest” which is a new feature for getting additional rewards. Not really needed, but if it has to be in please have it send you back to whatever page you were on, not kick you out all the way back to the main calendar. 2. After getting kicked back to the calendar, if you were in a previous month BEFORE getting kicked out of the page, you will be placed into the current month but the previous month’s name will show at the top and any dates you tap on will take you to the same date for the previous month. This has to be a bug. You can fix it by sliding to the previous month and back to the current month again, but it’s annoying. Maybe just...have it not kick us back to the main menu after completing a quest. That seems like a really easy way to fix this.

My everyday game app!

I have been a paid subscriber for several years now and continue to play every day. As a “senior” it keeps my mind challenged and clear. Not only do I complete all the daily puzzles and play my 5 daily “free” Special Issues puzzles, I have watched 20 ads each day to earn 100 extra tokens to play more, earning 5 tokens for each ad (I admit, I turn the volume down so I don’t hear the sound). However, since the latest App update, that ability to earn extra tokens seems to have been shut off. Not sure why. But I use the tokens during special events, which are always mysterious and fun, usually occurring over the weekends when I have extra time to play longer. Lately I have been going down the list of Special issues and completing one puzzle from each issue every day, using up these extra tokens. I have learned to enjoy the variety of games and puzzles to stimulate my brain each day. At first, I only played my favorites, but now I play them all. And for extra fun, I go back and play really old daily puzzles. I have so far gone backwards to June 2019 and those daily puzzles are all free to play. So if you are short of tokens, try that! This is well worth the price for me.

Please fix this irritation

Very good app, with a nice mix of puzzles (but one bad one). One interface flaw is that when leaving a Special Page and returning to the Special Issues index, the app assumes you want to play the same puzzle over and over, and opens that puzzle for you unasked. An index should be for the USER to decide where they wish to go, NOT the app. I and I’m sure many others rarely if ever play the same puzzle twice in a row; that’s repetitious and boring. Thus every time I go to the index, I have to close an unwanted choice by the program. The one puzzle that doesn’t belong is Picture Sweep, which violates the “prime directive” of puzzles that there be a unique solution. The vast majority of these puzzles require one to “guess” about certain boxes, which cannot be determined by logic or pattern analysis. This is a critical flaw in ANY self-respecting puzzle app. I will agree with other reviewers that there should be more than 5 Special Pages available on non-event days with a paid subscription. Probably not unlimited, but at least 10 a day would be fair. I guess the developer wants me to use my almost 20,000 coins, but I don’t — I just stop playing.

Cost vs encouragements

I was looking forward to trying out the variety of puzzles/games. And there are a lot of them. And each puzzle you complete you get a few coins. But if you want to keep playing, you pay with tokens. 10-20 tokens for each puzzle. Doesn’t matter that you can complete a puzzle in seconds. You have to pay for the next one. It would be more encouraging to continue, if you could take the coins you win for completion of games and have the opportunity to trade them in for tokens, so you can keep playing. I paid $ for 20 ‘on sale’ games, and they were spent in 8 minutes. Now what? I can’t keep playing unless I fork over more money, and there’s too many apps out there that you don’t have to pay for. If paying wasn’t an issue, it’s a great app. It’s very busy, though. Too much to read when I just wanna play. But the variety is very good, and no ads/commercials is nice. And I know you need to get paid by some means to provide this app. Just allow the coins to be traded in for tokens. Simple little request. Now your app sits unopened since I have no more tokens. I’d use it everyday if I didn’t have to pay for how much I use it. And I get that you offer unlimited games for like $40-$70 but that’s pretty steep. Again, there are plenty of free ones to keep me occupied. Thanks for the chance to try out a few games I have never played before, cause now I know what apps to look for. Sorry. The honeymoon is over.

Great puzzles

I love this and it’s new look is much more eye pleasing and fun. Only thing I am not super fond of is you only get 10-20 tokens for logging in everyday and you only get 5 tokens for watching a video which you have to watch in between puzzles. The only other way to get tokens is by doing the most annoying surveys ever. You never get to the end of the survey and if you back out you don’t get the tokens or you have to purchase something. Spent 30 mins doing one before I was irritated and still didn’t get the tokens anyways. If I wanted tokens bad enough to by something I would simply buy them from the shop without having to jump through loop holes. If the purpose of doing that to your customers is to trick them into buying tokens because it’s to hard to earn them then I don’t want to buy tokens. If I’m simply tired of doing things to try and get the tokens then great but if I can’t even work legitimately for the tickets I feel like that’s a bad play. Other then the tokens the games are always fun and challenging and the switching them daily is a good balance too. You really only get coins from the achievements so you can’t keep playing without buying more tokens or paying for the membership. But if your good with buying the membership it’s great for you

Unless you buy in, expect continual ad issues

So, started playing this app with a great variety of games and was fairly content with the restrictions of being a free player; periodically having to watch ads between puzzles and to get some rewards/tokens, restrictions on free tokens and so forth. However, recently, the adds for that annoyingly evil grandma and perpetually left at the alter redhead, among others like the idiot king that can’t figure out how to get to the outhouse have made this app an annoying crash party of repeating ads and black-screen restarts. About 50% of the ads fail to complete correctly and grant rewards/continued play. It does say right in the support FAQ that they take no responsibility for the ads they display on their own game and they may not work as intended. Oh, and you won’t get anything you were promised if the ad you dutifully watched for however long it took to crash, failed to allow you to continue playing. So, I went to their support system and complained about the crashing frequency thinking they cared about those players of their games that are negatively affected by their inability to control certain aspects of their own app but I was dismissed since they don’t control that aspect of their app. It seems they have a veiled strategy that pushes a player to either invest in the ad free version of their games or go find some other free game to play. I’m choosing the latter…

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