Last weekend, I built a Bird Memory Game. I was proud of it. Twenty cards, flip two, match the species. The kind of thing that feels obvious and elegant once it exists.
Then I sent it to people.
Turns out over 97% (fair estimation) of the people I know aren’t birders. They didn’t know a Shikra from a Munia, and more importantly, they didn’t care to learn through a memory game. The polite ones said “nice.” The honest ones said nothing. The game was fine. The audience was a rounding error.
So I sat with the actual lesson, which wasn’t “people are philistines.” It was simpler: I’d built something I loved and assumed everyone shared the prerequisite. Birds are a niche. Memory matching is universal. I’d bolted a wide mechanic onto a narrow subject and wondered why the door was empty.
The fix was to keep the mechanic and swap the subject for something nobody needs to study. Three days later, I built U2.
What U2 is
U2 is short for “ubiquitous two.” It’s a daily memory match with one twist: you’re not flipping identical cards, you’re matching the two halves of a compound word. SAND finds BOX and you’ve got SANDBOX. BLACK finds SMITH and you’ve got BLACKSMITH.
Twenty cards, ten pairs, one new puzzle every day. There’s a timer, a move counter, and a shared leaderboard ranked by fastest time. That’s the whole thing.
The reason it works where the birds didn’t is that compound words are the most democratic knowledge there is. You don’t have to be into anything. If you speak English, you already know the answers. The game just hides them for a few seconds.
The build
A couple of things under the hood were more fun than the surface lets on. The daily puzzle is deterministic, so everyone in the world gets the same board on the same day without me handing it out. The date seeds the shuffle, and every device computes the identical puzzle on its own. The calendar is the server.
The hook
Two hooks, really.
The social one: your time and move count are shareable. Beat your puzzle, send the result, and now your friend has to play to know if they can beat you. There’s no skill gatekeeping, so everyone believes they can win, which is exactly the belief you want before someone taps play.
The other is the daily reset. A new set of words every day means the game is never finished, just paused until tomorrow. It’s the same reason people do the crossword and Wordle. Not because any single puzzle matters, but because the next one is always waiting and it’s small enough to fit in a coffee.
On shipping fast
Two games in a week. One missed, one landed. I don’t think the bird game was a waste. Birders still love it. It was also the prototype that taught me what to work on next.
There’s a version of building where you plan for months and ship the perfect thing. I don’t work that way and I’ve stopped pretending I should. I build the fast, slightly wrong version, put it in front of people, watch what they ignore, and let that tell me what to make next.
Go play it. Today’s puzzle is waiting at u2.snanu.com, and somebody’s already at the top of the board.
