What surprised me wasn’t the growth, but player behavior.
I added a daily leaderboard mostly as a nice extra. No rewards, no social sharing, no incentives.
Players started replaying puzzles obsessively just to improve rank. Some would finish a level and immediately restart to shave off seconds.
It ended up driving more repeat sessions than progression itself.
Lesson learned: In logic games, light competition can outperform progression, even without rewards.
tocs3•1mo ago
keini•1mo ago
What surprised me is that even without direct competition, any visible signal of “progress” or “ranking” seems to trigger the same behavior.
In my case it wasn’t about beating others either, but about seeing yourself slightly higher than yesterday.
It feels very close to what you describe with Project Euler: not competition, but a quiet personal challenge.