If you like puzzle-of-the-day apps with regularly updated challenges rather than games that you could play for hours on end, I highly recommend the new Echodots color matching game for iPhone and iPad.
If you ever played the board game Mastermind as a kid, then Echodots is very similar. It’s a simple puzzle that works by showing you a sequence of colors, which you then have to repeat. It sounds incredibly simple, but the colors reproduce very quickly at first and some are very similar to others. So it’s not about choosing a shade of pink, green or orange, it’s about choosing the darkest pink, lightest green and medium orange.
You only get a few tries to try to get the sequence right, and with each try the app will mark the colors you choose with a tick, which means it’s correct, a question mark, which means the color is in the sequence but in a different place, or an X, which means it’s not there at all .
You may get an “echo” if you are confused. Which means you can see the replayed sequence again. But you’ll only get a limited number of these during the week which refill every Sunday, so it’s best to only use them if you have no idea what colors you’ve just seen.
Why are daily challenge apps so appealing?
A new Echodot sequence will be added every day, you can check when the app will land in your time zone, but you will also see that there is a countdown when you open it. I love apps for daily challenges and have a few common ones that I open every morning to get my brain going.
The problem is that I think the daily challenge apps have a good balance. Every game should be interesting enough to grab your attention, a challenge, to give you a little dose of fun every day, but not too easy to finish in 30 seconds and not too difficult to sweat over it for hours.
I’ve only been using Echodots for a few days, but so far it’s got the balance right and I think the extra streaks and leaderboards will be a great way to bring people back.