Picture opening a new puzzle app. What's the first thing that happens? A wall of text. A five-screen tutorial. A carousel of tips you frantically tap past. A “Welcome!” modal, a cookie banner, a “rate us” nudge, and somewhere behind all of it, eventually, a puzzle.
I'd sat through that a hundred times, and it always felt like being lectured before I was allowed to play. So when I started GridJoy, I made one rule early and stuck to it like glue: not a single word in the puzzles. None. Just numbers, a grid, and a little ghost.
People thought I was joking. I was not joking.
WORDS WERE THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION
Here's the thing about words in a number puzzle: they're almost always there to paper over a design that doesn't explain itself. If you need a paragraph to tell someone how a button works, the button's wrong. If you need a tutorial to explain the grid, the grid's wrong. Text is the polyfilla you smear over the cracks.
And words carry baggage. A word has a language. The second you put “Undo” on a button, you've quietly told everyone who doesn't read English: this wasn't built for you. You need a reading age. You need to stop and read, when all you wanted was to drop a number in a square and feel your brain click.
A number, though? A 7 is a 7 in Belfast, Tokyo, and São Paulo. It needs no translating, no reading level, no tutorial. The puzzle itself is already a universal language. I just had to get out of its way.
THE ANNOYING PART: NOW YOU HAVE TO ACTUALLY DESIGN IT
Banning words sounds freeing. In practice it's a straitjacket — a brilliant one. Because now every single thing the app needs to say has to be said without saying anything.
“This move was wrong” can't be a red error message — it has to be a colour, a shake, something you feel instantly. “You finished” can't be a “Congratulations!” banner — it has to be the board itself celebrating. “Here's how this puzzle type works” can't be a tooltip — it has to be a layout so clear you just know. Every shortcut a word would have given me, I had to earn with shape, colour, motion, and timing instead.
That's where the ghost earns its keep. All the warmth and personality an app usually crams into chirpy little text bubbles — “Nice one!”, “Ouch, try again!” — the ghost carries instead, with a look, a bounce, a sag of the shoulders. It does all the talking without ever opening its mouth, because it hasn't got one. It turns out a companion that reacts beats a sentence that tells, every time.
THE PAYOFF I DIDN'T FULLY SEE COMING
The bit I only properly appreciated later: a wordless puzzle is already playable everywhere. When it came time to support other languages, there were no puzzles to translate — because there's no language in them. The only words that exist anywhere in GridJoy live in the menus, and that's a tiny pile of labels, not a mountain of content. A whole app, ready for the world, because I'd refused to write paragraphs into it in the first place.
And it's not just languages. A kid who isn't a confident reader yet can sit down and play. Someone who finds walls of text hard going can just... play. Nobody has to read their way to the fun. You open it, and the puzzle's right there, no lecture, no tour, no “tap to continue.”
NUMBERS AND A GHOST
That's the whole identity, really. No words. Numbers and a ghost. A puzzle that explains itself and a companion that feels things at you instead of talking at you. It made every design problem harder and the finished thing far better — calmer, faster to get into, open to anyone who can count.
Best way to see what I mean is to just open one — no tutorial required, obviously. Today's puzzle is here, and there are eighteen kinds to wander through. The ghost will take it from there.
— the (wordlessly opinionated) dev behind GridJoy 👻