• Just like we talked about last month, the second season of games for the Playdate handheld is starting now with 12 more games coming out weekly for $40. This week is already off to a good start. I’m excited to check out Fulcrum Defender from Subset Games and Dig! Dig! Dino! by Dom2D & Fáyer along with whatever Blippo+ is.

    Might try and stream some of them in the next day or so.

  • Besides a variety of card games, Coincidence is also developing a more Zach-Like game in the form of Kaizen: A Factory Story. It’s a factory automation game where you play new-to-Japan David Sugimoto who is put in charge of developing assembly lines at Matsuzawa Manufacturing for classic electronics and other products.

    On first glance Kaizen might look very similar to the old Zachtronics games, like TIS-100 and Opus Magnum, I don’t have any reason to expect it’ll be significantly different. There’s even a pachinko-themed Solitaire game built-in. I am so psyched.

    There is no release time frame outside of the publisher’s 2025 estimate for Kaizen: A Factory Story yet, just a Steam page for wishlisting that claims to support Linux, macOS, and Windows. 

    Usually their video games are released into a brief Early Access window, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case here as well but there are no indications of one on the Steam page. There is a post where a moderator gave an estimate of a few months before Kaizen comes out, and that was a month ago, but that isn’t with any certainty. I’d hope it’ll be available this Summer.

  • The Ex-Zachtronics-ers at game co-operative Coincidence are working on a new scratch-off-based card game appropriately titled The Zach Attack! Scratch ‘n Solve Puzzle Pack:

    The Zach Attack! Scratch ‘n Solve Puzzle Pack is a collection of six different scratch-off games that combine the deductive thinking of logic puzzles with the risk management of push-your-luck games. Scratch off some serious fun!

    Exciting news. Shipping is promised for late this year or early 2026 if things go to plan and with almost anyone else I’d be a little concerned about ordering a product right now based on a crowdfunding plan due to everything going on with shipping. However, Barth and his crew of co-operatives have been very good about shipping their work out and I’ve never been disappointed by their games. The Zach Attack! crowdfunding campaign promises they’re looking into multiple factories and have already done all the other work on the game besides printing it.

    It’s $20 to get a single set of all six games, and each game includes 10 variations. The crowdfunding page goes into more detail about the games, as do the rules for the games.

  • There’s so much more to Iraq than what TV, movies, and games have shown us. I really appreciate getting a glimpse of this place and its people from Sarah Teng. She has more about her trip in this write-up at Petapixel.

  • I’ve been complaining about how Duolingo punishes users for mistakes for a long time now, they’re now moving from hearts that you lose when you make a mistake, to an energy mechanic according to this article from Jay Peters writing for The Verge:

    Under the new system, you’ll spend one unit of energy to complete an exercise, and a mistake will cost one energy. But you’ll also get extra energy back at a randomized rate for completing multiple lessons right in a row. As a result, users should be able to do more lessons, and that’s what’s showing up in the data, Moses Wayne, a senior staff engineer at Duolingo, tells The Verge.

    There’s a bunch of math that goes into this to figure out that it will be similarly punishing for free users as the current Heart-based system. As before, Duolingo subscribers get unlimited Energy.

    I’ve also noticed that Duolingo’ve added a Chess course, which I’ve only tried a little bit.

    It feels like the Duolingo company is in Emergency save-our-reputation mode with these changes. I don’t believe the change to Energy from Hearts is good enough, it still slows down free users from focusing on learning with whatever time they have available and will likely end-up penalizing people for making mistakes. They should either move to subscription only or just have more ads for free users instead of slowing them down. What is the cost to the company for a free user these days? It can’t be much.

    Here’s my sure-fire way to save the company’s reputation:

    • Take the company private
    • Drop all internal AI slop and plans for the slop
    • Hire the workers back
    • Make the company a worker-owned co-op
    • Luis von Ahn retires.
    • Users now fully on-board, move to subscriptions only for most users, let users buy each other subscriptions and offer no-questions-asked discounts for anyone who can’t afford the full-price subscription.