Numtter Gets Confetti, and Numstone Is Born

Confetti

Numtter is a UNO-style card game played with number cards.

A child came to me while playing Numtter, not sure what to do. Looking at the screen, the target number was 1, but the cards in hand were 4, 5, 5, 6, and 7 — with only the + operator available. There was no way to make 1 with those cards.

“Press Skip. The target is 2 now — press Skip again.”

When I got home, I added a help message at the bottom of the game screen:

“If you can make the target number, press Submit. If you can’t, press Skip.”

I added it in both Korean and English.

A few days ago, a badge email arrived from Google saying there had been 500 clicks in the past 28 days. When I opened the email, confetti burst across the screen. It was pretty, and it made me happy. YouTube Shorts does the same thing when a video hits 100 views.

So I added confetti to Numtter too — when you successfully use up all your number cards, confetti flies. It’ll be a nice moment.

The Birth of Numstone

I came across a mobile game ad where cups slide and merge into larger cups, which are then served to customers. Watching it, an idea came to me.

What if instead of cups, you dropped number cards — and matching numbers merged into a larger number? A day later, the idea developed further. Instead of sending cards upward, drop them from above.

It’s a merge game using numbers, so it’s similar to 2048 — but different. Like Tetris, the player only controls where each card drops. Once a card lands, it can’t be moved. When two adjacent cards with the same number meet, the one that arrived later gets absorbed into the earlier one, merging into a single card with double the value.

To keep it from becoming too easy, I placed rocks around the grid to block falling cards. The grid starts as 4×4, like 2048, and Claude handled the coding. After testing it, it was fun. I created a GitHub repository, wrote the README, wrote the sitemap, and built a 5×5 version as well.

For the Numstone intro image, I asked Gemini to create one. The first version showed a cat holding a rock, but the cat looked like it was struggling. I asked for a new version with the cat standing on the rock instead, and swapped it out.

Before building Numstone, Claude confirmed that no identical game exists. Even so, if the Korea Copyright Commission rejects the registration, it probably means something similar is already out there — and in that case, I’ll scrap it.

You can play the game by clicking on the image.

The To-Do List Never Gets Shorter

I keep a list of things to do for Soosooland, but whenever a new game idea comes to me, everything else gets pushed aside. This month alone: Numtle launched on May 16th, and Numstone was announced on May 24th. The list never shrinks.

Even so, seeing the user count grow little by little gives me energy. 

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