Love this app but have one major question for developers
Absolutely love this game! I’m obsessed with doing countdown math problems & this lets me do as many as I want easily. It works perfectly every time. My one big question is - what do the different color tiles mean? Sometime when I’m solving one, the numbers turn red or green or brown when I use them in the board but there doesn’t seem to be a pattern. It’s driving me nuts!
I just can’t get past the way this app has to be used in order to enjoy it. And the Countdown Numbers Game (“Le Compte Est Bon”) is one of my absolute favorites! This is such a disappointment because most other versions of this game are missing the solver, which is great here. But this is basically a gamified calculator, and while even cheap, physical calculators work by pressing buttons, the only way to play this game is by dragging numbers around the screen. Tapping to calculate isn’t even an option. That makes gameplay slow and unwieldy. And even though I actually like the lack of timer (though it would be nice to have as an option) I still want to get the calculation out of my head as fast as possible!
Wow! I’m actually teaching a course on puzzles, and Countdown is in there, along with Krypto, the 5-card and target variant here in the US. This app is a fantastic implementation of Countdown, with a great interface for playing, a solver (looks a lot like dcode.fr!), and a great menu of different game difficulties! I am impressed because a friend of mine and I tried to code a variation of Krypto that had 4 cards and a target for iOS, and it was difficult. Again, great job, and I encourage you to continue to develop this app with more game variations, and maybe even more operators!
Countdown is a game show on British television (French original: Des chiffres et des lettres). This app reworks the “Numbers” portion of the game show as a Scrabble®-like tile game for your iPhone or iPad. It includes a Universal Solver that finds all possible solutions to any Numbers puzzle you care to throw at it. Feature List: • The “Numbers” rounds of the Countdown game show, reworked as a Scrabble®-like tile game. • More than 11 million unique starting configurations at your disposal. (The precise figure is 11 918 700.) • Play the game by dragging numbered tiles onto the game board and progressively building up arithmetic expressions to a final result that matches the target number (or comes within ten of it). • Includes a Universal Solver that finds, within a few seconds, all possible solutions for a given initial configuration. Furthermore, if no solution is found, you can be sure that no solution exists. • In generating the list of solutions, the Universal Solver recognizes new solutions that are near-duplicates of pre-existing solutions — e.g., with minor variations in the order of the arithmetic expressions — and culls such new solutions in order to the keep the list of solutions manageable. • Fully integrated with Apple’s Messages app, so you can share your accomplishments with your friends and issue challenges to them. • A single universal app which runs on all your iOS devices: iPhone, iPad, and/or iPod touch.
