First ever newsletter

Hey you, you know who you are, the one and only subscriber of this newsletter!

Welcome to the very first DLES.gg newsletter! As I mention near the sign up form, this is going to be a semi-regular, update from the world of DLES. No corporate marketing fluff, just a bit of spotlight on the newly added games, sparkled with a tiny bit of updates on what's new on this page and a what’s going on across the daily puzzle game world.

Recently added games

• Auctimate — View real photos and listing details for a U.S. government surplus auction lot, then guess its final sale price in USD. 5 rounds, each scored up to 1000 points based on how close your guess is.

• Whodle — Each wrong guess reveals another frame from a mystery Doctor Who episode. Search the full episode list and name it correctly within 5 tries.

• Gazettle — Three word puzzles in one: Classic is a 5-letter Wordle-style guesser (6 tries), Semantic has you find a hidden word using meaning-similarity feedback, and Bridge has you arrange scrambled words into a chain linking a start word to a target word.

• Boston Globe - Align — Unscramble a grid of letter tiles by swapping pairs to form 10 valid words across rows and columns in the fewest moves or fastest time.

• Clue Tube — Guess the YouTube video from a series of its actual user comments, revealing up to 6 total comments with each wrong guess or skip.

• Crayondle — Adjust the Red, Green, and Blue sliders to recreate the exact RGB color of today's named crayon in 1 single attempt.

• Electle — Identify the country and exact election year depicted by the parliamentary lower house seating diagram by selecting a country on the world map and typing the year.

In the meantime in the world of DLES

The space is super vibrant right now, with the rise of vibe coding, the entry barrier to create a new game has never been so low. That, however, makes it way harder cut through the noise, and yet, look at these 3 successful launches on HackerNews.

Just 20 days ago user called realmofthemad has gone viral with their game Gerrymandle. Then, 16 days ago, HaxleRose successfully launched an entire newspaper style collection of daily puzzle games called Puzzle Lair - I've not added it to DLES.gg because it's heavily pushing players to create accounts, which goes a bit against my idea of ideal dle, but hey, it went viral! And last but not the least, 13 days ago cowboy_henk went viral with their rogue-like, chess inspired game Prince Chazz.

These were the good news, and like in every great movie, here comes be a bit of darkness. Unfortunately, we've got some sad news from the folks at The Atlantic, who are going to sunset Fluxis on the 15th of July. The game creator commented: "Sad as well that my little contraption has been put on the chopping block. I left the Director of Games full-time in April (and stopped editing it as well) and I don't think it was giving them the numbers they wanted. I love the game still and offered to stay on part-time to continue improving and editing it. C'est la vie!"

One more heavy announcement came from Microsoft where they hit the reset button on Xbox, laying off around 1,600 people now with another 1,250 to follow over the next year, and dropping several game studios, all to free up more money for AI. That's thousands of seriously talented game developers suddenly out of work, which is just rough, no way around it.

But, like in every great movie, let's end it with a small hopeful thought. Some of the best daily games ever made came from one person with an idea that wouldn't leave them alone and a bit of time to chase it. Wordle itself started as a side project built for an audience of one. So if you're one of those newly free devs reading this, take it as your sign: go build the weird little daily game only you would make. I'll add it to the directory the day it goes live.

Improvements to DLES.gg

I've added quite a few things recently:

1. I have a newsletter! (and you're reading it right now) 2. Changelog now contains also technical updates about this site 3. I've added a graveyard with all discontinued dles: dles.gg/graveyard 4. Game in your ritual on mobile now takes you straight to the game (previously it opened the description first, which was annoying) 5. assets.dles.gg now contains a useful collection of 2,3,4...28 letter words originated from the open source ENABLE wordlist, 3D assets and the entire dles collection in a single json file

Well, that's it really. You managed to read all the way here? You are awesome!

If you have any thoughts on the above, or just want to say hi, hit that reply button, I can't wait to read from you.

Stay puzzling, Peter