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.
01Playabl is seven daily puzzles for my friends group chat, live at playabl.xyz since 5 June 2026. Nakze is four daily Lebanese games, live at nakze.com since 14 June. I am Lebanese. The second one is personal.
02Both were dead apps first, a live-events hub and a livability dashboard. I rebuilt them as daily games nine days apart in June, the second on the first one's machinery.
03Same board for everyone, every day. Today, and yesterday at half points, and nothing older. Missing a day should cost something.
04Playabl looks like a press sheet, Nakze like hand-painted Beirut street signage. Both hide a secret game behind a long-press.
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. Half of the six data feeds it ran on were never wired up.
I killed both. The diagnosis was the same twice. 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 5 June, "feat: rebuild playabl.xyz as Playabl daily-puzzle game". 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. A 6x6 sudoku, a word game, connections, nerdle, trivia, an anagram, and a cryptogram. Fresh at midnight. The week keeps score. On Sunday night the leaderboard crowns a champion. By Monday it means nothing.
Two of the seven hand out hints. Take hints past half the puzzle and the game scores zero even if you finish it. A long-press on the logo opens a hidden hard mode, scored in stars and walled off from the weekly board. A finished game gets stamped SOLVED, in ink, the way a press sheet gets stamped.
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.
For Lebanon
Nakze is the same idea pointed at a country. Four games, Lebanese by content and by name. Wasle (وصلة) hands you sixteen words to group into four hidden Lebanese categories. Amthal (أمثال) starts a proverb and asks you to finish it, or to match it to its meaning. 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.
Three of those four are made of things you can look up. Sixteen Lebanese words, a photo with a license on it, a town with real coordinates. Amthal needed proverbs. The one academic set I found added eight once I dropped the duplicates, and its full 495 sit behind a blank license field. Scraping would break the rule I had already set on Playabl, and generating would break it worse. The plan I wrote that day ends the search in three words. "Did not fabricate."
The look is hand-painted Beirut street signage. Limestone, near-black ink, a brick-red slanted sign panel, hard offset shadows. No blur, no dark mode.
The default script is Arabizi, Latin letters with numerals, the way Lebanese group chats actually type. A full Arabic mode sits behind it, every string already written twice, switched off because the code says the rendering is not finalized.
On 16 June the puzzle rolled over an hour early, because the time zone table the site reads still had Beirut on summer time. A player who finished in that last hour before local midnight showed as done for all of the next day, with the Dabké bonus unlocked, without having played it. I pinned the day to a fixed clock instead.
A long-press on the header opens Dabké, an endless runner over a flat Beirut skyline, and clearing the whole board opens it too. 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)".
One spine
The spine is the same on both. Everyone opens the same board on the same day. Playabl works its puzzles out from the date itself, in the browser. Nakze had a full year of days written out in advance. 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.
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?" By the time Nakze pivoted it was in its content guide. "Curate, don't fabricate." Nakze's photos are Wikimedia Commons, credited one by one, and its towns come out of Wikidata through a script whose first line reads "real coords, no hallucination".
Playabl's last feature landed on 22 June and Nakze's last ship went out on 2 July. Since then I have opened Playabl once, on 8 August, to fix hard mode levels that had gone unplayable. A bot pushes the day's puzzle explanations every morning, and that is all. Nakze I have not touched 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.