29 august 2026 · düsseldorf

Playabl & Nakze

Two dead apps became two daily puzzle sites, nine days apart in June 2026. Seven games a day for my friends group chat, and four Lebanese games for Lebanon.

Playabl & Nakze, drawn as a two-ink print
The Playabl wordmark animating: two misregistered color layers slide into register over the NIGHTLY EDITION stamp.
playabl's masthead, registering in.
The brick-red slanted Nakze sign settling onto limestone while the dancer dot moves along its four-color path.
nakze's sign. brick red on limestone.

No reason to come back

I built a set of daily puzzles for my friends group chat. Then I built four more for Lebanon, and found out that nobody had ever put my country's proverbs on the internet in a form I was allowed to use. I shipped 193 rather than make the rest up.

Both sites were something else first. playabl.xyz went up on 16 April 2026 as a live-events hub. Eurovision, the World Cup, the Voice, F1, the NBA playoffs, and a play-money betting economy bolted on the side. Lebanon Pulse had gone up a month earlier, on 15 March 2026, as a daily livability score for the country.

I killed both. Nothing in either app gave anyone a reason to come back tomorrow. A daily puzzle is exactly that reason, and nothing else.

The pivots landed nine days apart. On 14 June, Nakze took Playabl's scoring, sign-in and leaderboard whole, and its games went up in a day.

For the group chat

Playabl exists because my friends group chat needed something to argue about every morning. Every day the site deals the same seven games to everyone. Fresh at midnight. The week keeps score. On Sunday night the leaderboard crowns a champion. By Monday it means nothing.

The identity is called Night Press. The Today page is a press sheet, masthead on top, the games in a two-column ink grid, and the splash is what the mark at the top of this page is doing, two color layers sliding into register. I skipped the animation libraries. A newspaper does not need a physics engine.

The Playabl today page: the Night Press masthead over a two-column ink grid of the seven daily games.
the today page · seven games on one press sheet
Playabl on a phone: the press-sheet Today page, edition number, week strip, and the seven game cards.
The 6x6 sudoku mid-solve on a phone, entries and conflicts color-coded.
The cryptogram mid-solve on a phone, a ciphered quote attributed to Buddha, with the hint button reading minus one hundred.
on the phone, where the arguing happens · a hint costs a hundred, honestly labeled

For Lebanon

Nakze is the same idea pointed at a country. Wasle (وصلة) hands you sixteen words to group into four hidden Lebanese categories. Amthal (أمثال) starts a proverb and asks you to finish it. Wein? (وين؟) shows you a landmark photo for five seconds, hides it, and gives you ten to pin it on the map from memory. Dabbous (دبّوس) names a town and you drop the pin where it really is.

The look is hand-painted Beirut street signage. No blur, no dark mode.

The default script is Arabizi, Latin letters with numerals, the way Lebanese group chats actually type.

A long-press on the header opens Dabké, an endless runner over a flat Beirut skyline. The dancer started as a dot in the logo. "Turn the poke dot into a little dabké dancer (stomping legs + a raised arm waving a mustard mandeel)".

The Nakze landing: four limestone game panels with hard offset shadows under the brick-red slanted sign.
the front door · four signs on a stone wall
Wasle on a phone: sixteen Lebanese names on limestone tiles, four mistakes allowed, the brick-red Wasle sign on top.
Amthal on a phone, in Arabizi: a proverb to finish, the options written the way Lebanese group chats type.
Wein? on a phone in its memorize phase: a Lebanese landscape with the photographer and Wikimedia Commons license printed under the photo.
wasle, amthal, wein? · the license is printed under the photo

One spine

Everyone opens the same board on the same day. You can play today, and yesterday at half points. That is the whole window. Nakze shipped with an archive and deleted it the same day to match. Missing a day should cost something, or the ritual is just a menu.

The Playabl app icon: three overlapping circles, blue, purple and red, on near-black. Playabl
The Nakze app icon: the dancer dot over a four-color path, on limestone. Nakze
both installed

Every pack on both sites comes from somewhere real and licensed. The rule dates to Playabl's first content run, when AI-written trivia came up and I asked "are you sure we can't get this from an external api or scrape it?"

the full roster · seven in ink, four on stone

Playabl's last feature landed on 22 June and Nakze's last ship went out on 2 July. Between then and 29 August 2026 I opened Playabl once, on 8 August. Nakze I did not touch at all. Tomorrow's boards already exist, for the group chat and for Lebanon, whether I touch the code or not. They deal at midnight.