Amountle: guess how many landed in the jar

It sounds too simple to work. Counting is the one skill everybody assumes they have, which is exactly why it stings when the answer comes back and you were off by half.

You watch the pile form, and you still get it wrong

A round starts with the drop. Pills, eggs, cubes, whatever today's object is. They bounce, pile up, and a few always roll to the back where you can't see them. You can drag to spin the container and look from the side, which helps less than you'd hope.

Then the count runs up on screen, one by one, until it stops at the real number. An exact guess gets 100 points plus a bonus that grows with the size of the pile. Being close still pays, being way off pays nothing, and the game tells you which one it was in two words.

Isaac, who makes it, explains why on his about page:

I built Amountle because I wanted to know if I could guess how many things are in a jar. Turns out I mostly can't.

I like that sentence a lot. Most game pages tell you how good you'll get. His tells you he's still bad at it.

It's one guy, and you can tell

Isaac lives in Canada and builds Amountle next to a regular job. No studio. He makes the puzzles, answers the mail and reads the object ideas people send in through a suggestion box on the home page. On the morning of 26 September the home page showed puzzle #269 and a leaderboard with 722 scores already in.

Once the Daily is done, there's more to play:

There are no ads. Amountle+ costs $9.99 once and adds the archive and a second daily puzzle, and nothing you buy touches your score. I run roughly the same way from Switzerland, so maybe I'm biased. But I've seen enough daily games bolt on ads after their first good month to notice when someone doesn't.

Yes, I make a competing game

roughly is a set of estimation games, and it's mine. So take this with that in mind. The two ask different things, though. roughly wants you to guess what you can't see from your chair: how big something is, how far away, what year. Amountle puts the answer right in front of you and dares you to count it. I play both, and they don't get in each other's way.

Isaac and I got on a call in September and swapped notes about building a daily game alone. Nobody paid for this post, and every number in it comes from his own pages.

If you hate timers, skip it

Fifteen seconds is short. If you like to sit with a puzzle, Amountle will feel rushed, and if you want words or trivia, there's nothing here for you.

Otherwise, play it once tomorrow and send your score to someone. You'll know after one round whether you're the kind of person who guesses high. More dailies without words are in this list of fourteen I checked, and the about page has the story behind roughly.