Introducing Pokedle and Hearthdle to Out of Games

Woo! Birthday week continues with new fun additions to the website, let's see what's going on and what you can expect going forward.

A Note on Recent Bugs

We had a few critical bugs hit with the introduction of Scavenger Hunts and our first one the Cataclysmic Event. These have been resolved so if you have been having trouble with solving the hunt, you should now be able to complete it. I recommend hitting Abandon Hunt in order to start your timer from scratch, unless you paused the hunt.

My apologies, our live environment is slightly different than our dev one and unfortunately in the way I'm able to test things sometimes, some of the development environment data makes it over to my account on the live website and makes it appear as if things are working.

Please see our site update notes for March 12 and March 13.

Pokemon Database on Out of Games

We've got a Pokemon database filled with all the Pokemon! We've got a new page on the Pokemon realm called "Pokedex" where you can find beautiful sprites of the many hundreds of beautiful pocket monsters that exist. Clicking on them, takes you to data-rich pages showcasing their stats, their moves, and information on their evolutions.

This is our first step in getting more Pokemon data on the website, with a focus on the main games via the Pokedex, so the time Winds and Waves shows up, we should have a rock solid baseline for building content around Pokemon. Go checkout Charizard, one of my favourites.

Also, yes, the Pokemon TCG support is coming alongside deckbuilding, collection management, and oh I've said too much. We're still a bit of a ways out for that but it's in the production pipeline.

Introducing Pokedle!

We've got a brand new feature called Pokedle! This is a Wordle clone that takes the Pokemon in our database (not all the wild Galarian and such types) and creates daily puzzles to solve. Daily puzzles are going to be enabled this Sunday, so in anticipation of that momentous occasion, we have a Practice Mode for you to try.

Daily puzzles in our "Dle" games will keep track of your streaks and we have leaderboards that will activate when they turn on. The puzzles rotate at Midnight on Eastern Time, this is different from Wordle which does so in your localized timezone. For us, this is easier and if you're coming to do the daily "dle" games here on Out of Games, you're likely coming around the same time each day which makes it easy to keep up with the streak.

Right now we're capping guesses at 8. I'd love people to give this a go in our currently active Practice Mode and give us any other feedback you may have. I want us to hit a balance in difficulty so we can always add additional data points to make the game a bit easier. I'm on the fence about adding the "generation" to the display because it might make it too easy but please do let me know.

We're also collecting data on how people are playing Pokedle internally, so even if you don't write us any feedback, we have an idea of how people are doing.

Introducing Hearthdle

Whaaat? A second one? This actually went live yesterday and due to a ton of work surrounding the Hearthstone patch this week, I didn't get a chance to write a proper preview article for the new activity so we're including it in this one.

Just like Pokedle, but with Hearthstone cards. Now, Hearthstone is a massive game, larger than the number of Pokemon that exist, so we've got two different versions you can play: Standard, and Wild. Standard is great because the card pool is smaller and you can get quite intimate with the new pool thanks to the Year of the Scarab set rotation.

Speaking of, as new Standard sets release, we will make sure there are chances for newer cards added to make it into the pool, but it won't be until after expansions release with their full card sets. When we see a Standard rotation happen each year, we will make sure that only cards still in Standard are going to be shown in future daily puzzles (and practice mode, of course).

As you can see, we show you the card set which is ordered chronologically by release date. Newer sets first! You've also got your common data points such as Mana, Attack, and Health alongside Class and Rarity to help narrow down your guesses. It was quite a bit of fun to test everything out while creating this new feature, so I can imagine playing it without the burden of fixing problems will be much more entertaining.

If you notice anything funky about cards you don't think should be appearing in either game's pool, please let us know and if you have screenshots, those are even better! Anyone can upload screenshots here on Out of Games by simply pasting images into our text editor.

I'm considering adding in the Tribe / Spell School as a column, it feels like it would be a good addition. Thoughts?

That's it for today's set of birthday week updates. Are you having fun with any of our new activities?