Counting Spaces

Counting Spaces is a word and number puzzle game that rewards patience and thinking. The rules take seconds to learn. The depth comes from how you use them.

Every round begins with a hidden word or number. You enter a guess, and two numbers come back. The first is how many unique characters you share with the answer. The second is how many are in the correct position. That is everything the game tells you. No colored tiles. No hints about individual letters. You reason from the counts.

Say the answer is four letters and you guess DIAL. Back comes a 3 and a 2. Three of your letters are in the answer somewhere. Two of them are already sitting in the right spot. Which three, and which two, is yours to work out.

Most puzzle apps throw visual noise at you. Tiles flashing colors, fireworks on every answer, dancing emoji. Counting Spaces goes the other direction. The board is quiet. The rows line up. Your eye finds what it needs without hunting. When the round ends, the answer appears with its definition, so you walk away knowing something new.

There is a new daily challenge every day. One word puzzle and one number puzzle at every difficulty, and everyone playing gets the same ones. They roll over at midnight UTC. You get one attempt at each. Miss a day and it is gone.

Finish a daily and you can see where you landed against everyone else who played it. Accounts are anonymous. No email, no password, no contact information. You get a recovery code, and that code is the account. Keep your stats backed up and move them to a new phone whenever you want, or skip the account entirely and keep everything on your device. Daily challenges work either way, and every other game works with no connection at all.

The board gives you room to think in your own way. Enable and disable characters, select them, and lock down the ones you are sure about.

Six difficulties cover every mood.

Casual - is for a coffee break. Unlimited turns, no clock, genuinely relaxing.
Easy - sticks to short and familiar words with a cap of 20 turns.
Medium - moves up to words of middle length at the same turn limit.
Hard - brings in longer, less common words, still inside 20 turns.
Insane - gives you very long, rare words and only 15 turns to land them.
Obscura - is the weird tail of the dictionary. Unlimited turns. Built for curiosity more than challenge.

Counting Spaces has a very large dictionary, with a definition waiting for nearly every word. You can enable names and places if you want cities, countries, and names in the mix. Turn them off to keep it to standard dictionary words.

Number games use the same core mechanic with digit sequences. No dictionary to reason about. Only patterns and logic.

The design is minimal because a puzzle deserves room to breathe. One font. One accent color. Hold a letter to lock it when you are sure. Hold it again to release. Hold a committed letter on the board to rule it out across every row at once.

Track everything you have played. Your tot