u/abako-mental-maths

Link to the game

A few weeks ago I shared Abako, a small experiment: what if mental math felt like an 80s arcade instead of homework? The feedback here was blunt and genuinely useful. Here's what a month of it turned into.

What you asked for → what I shipped

• "It's fun, but I don't know why I'm doing this." → The Dojo: a training path that takes you from counting all the way to mental multiplication, one notion at a time, with belts to earn.
• "Give me a reason to come back." → Boss Fight: 32 hand-drawn 8-bit bosses, each with its own personality and trash talk. Beat one and it actually concedes — "You got me mid-nap. Doesn't count. I think. Zzz." Win stars, unlock the next district.
• "How good am I, actually?" → a real ELO rating and a room leaderboard, so progress is measurable instead of vibes.
• "My kid wants to play too." → household profiles: everyone keeps their own stats and belts on the same device.
• Plus: a daily puzzle, victory fanfares that scale with how big the win was, full English + French, and its own domain.

The core loop hasn't changed: an equation flashes, you answer on a keypad, you chain as many as you can. Three mistakes and the run is over, and it gets faster the higher you climb. Latency was the whole point, so there's nothing between you and the next question.

It runs in your browser (works on mobile, installable as a PWA), it's free, and you don't need an account to start.

Would love to here new feedbacks --> Try it now :)

Web, free, no signup: https://abako.games/?src=reddit_imadethis_v1

Neon arcade look, worldwide daily puzzle, and "ghost duels" against replays of real runs. Built solo in the evenings. Happy to answer anything about the rating math or the CRT shader.

Feedback I'm hungriest for: (1) the exact problem number where the difficulty curve stops being fun, (2) whether anything would make you come back tomorrow. Brutal honesty welcome — I'm reviewing other games in this thread in exchange, per the sub's spirit.

Solo dev, evenings only. It's a web game — no install, no signup, you're playing in 5 seconds: https://abako.games/?src=reddit_sideproject_v1

The pitch: mental arithmetic, but built like an arcade game. Neon CRT look, chess.com-style rating (every problem moves your ELO), a daily puzzle with one worldwide seed, and ghost duels: at the end of a run you get a challenge link, and your friend races your replay at your actual timings.

Start with ARCADE mode — that's the core loop, and it's what my two questions are about:

**1. The difficulty curve.** Does Arcade get hard too fast? Too slow? Just tell me the problem number where it stopped being fun (or started). One number = gold for me.

**2. Would you come back tomorrow?** The daily puzzle is my whole bet on day-2 retention. If after one session your honest answer is "nah", I'd rather hear it now than build the wrong thing for a month.

8 days in: ~120 players, decent activation, but almost all from my own network — so I genuinely can't see any of this from the inside.

Trade offer: reply with your project and I'll actually use it and give you the same kind of specific feedback. No drive-by "looks great!" — I'll tell you where I got confused or bored, with details.