I enjoy daily mini-games. I play the New York Times ones (Wordle, Connections, and the mini crossword) and sometimes Clues By Sam if I am feeling extra smart. Recently I have discovered my new favorite - Estimania.
I am writing this post because I think Estimania is a great game that more people should play. Each day you get five deceptively simple trivia questions - you are not expected to get the answer exactly, you are scored on how close your quick, back-of-the envelope estimate is.
The questions are varied and interesting. I find what works for me is answering with my first guess. If I consider my answer for too long I tend to second guess myself in ways that lead away from the correct answer.
You should click here and play today's game before reading the rest of this post.
But, great as they are, the questions are not why I think Estimania deserves more love. Estimania just has the best design of any similar game. Let me count the ways:
- There is no logon process - you can just start playing. Estimania doesn't really have accounts but it does (optionally) give you a code that allows you to transfer scores across devices.
- It doesn't ask for your email, or any information at all. Despite not having accounts, Estomania manages to have a leaderboard.
- The website is not laden with advertising and has minimal graphics. It is very lightweight compared to similar sites, which is very important for a game designed to be played on a commute with spotty network coverage.
- Their privacy statement is incredibly readable and comprehensive. This is the standard which other websites should aspire to.
But the very best part of Estimania is hidden in the source code:
<link rel="manifest" href="/manifest.json"/>
Estimania doesn't have a app, but the author has thoughtfully done the tiny bit of work needed to turn their web page into a Progressive Web App, which allows users to install it on their phones with one click. For the user, this is a much better choice than installing a full app from the app store. Despite being a PWA, it integrates well with iOS. It even asks you nicely if you want to turn on notifications.
So far this is all praise for a game I like. I promised you a rant.
I am sick of installing apps from the App Store that could have easily been implemented as web pages or PWAs. I am looking at you, NYT Games App.
The NYT Games App is also very simple. It allows you to play crossword puzzles, a few tile moving games, The Connecting WallConnections, and of course the all conquering Wordle. It has accounts, some history, and that is about it.
The Estimania PWA takes only 33Kb. I suspect the bulk of this is actually the app icon.
Lets compare out how much of my very expensive phone storage the two games use. First up; Estimania clocking in at a quite reasonable 33Kb. This is a little misleading because the PWA will download resources from the internet as needed but still pretty nice.
Lets play a game, Estimania-style. In late 1990 15 year-old me bought an brand new Amiga500. It cost me $NZ1900, my entire lifesavings at the time, and came with 512Kb of memory. At the time it was considered a fairly powerful computer, with plenty of memory for games and applications.
Attribution: This is a modified version of the wikicommons picture uploaded by Bill Bertram
Before you scroll down, guess how many Amiga500s it would take to store what the NYT Games App takes out of my very expensive phone storage.
For those playing along, this fairly simple app takes three hundred and sixty two Amiga500s. Maybe this means nothing to you but I have a degree in computer science and it is my professional opinion that that is far too many Amiga500s.
I am honestly not sure what the 55.2Mb of Documents & Data could be. The app does store history of every game I have played going back years. Maybe it contains all the crosswords I haven't played yet, just in case I want to complete the Sunday March 22nd, 2020. In either case, this is data I can do without.
And why is the app so large? Lots of games need to be that large because of all the graphics, music, and 3d models. The NYT app has none of these things - the aforementioned Amiga500 could easy recreate any of the puzzles without breaking a sweat.
All this for some puzzle games that recreate what is on the NYT website. I am not sure but the app might actually be the website, certainly the app doesn't work without internet access. Sometimes it doesn't work even with internet access - I've noticed that even if you start the app with weak signal it often fails to initialize properly.
I actually pay good money to the NYT for the privilege of storing 181Mb of code and data on my phone for the 5 minutes a day when I interact with their content. I don't have any particular problems with the app apart from its size - it works well enough although it is weirdly slow on my 8 year old iPad. I just wish that the NYT and other providers would realize that they are paying a lot of money to maintain an app that isn't really needed.