Rhyme or Reason
Oct 8, 2026 · A daily sorting puzzle. One messy drawer, the same for everyone, and a hidden rule. Sort it in 5 Wordle-style checks, then name the rule.
Rhyme or Reason came out of looking at what's trending on Steam. Tidying games are having a moment, and A Little to the Left showed how good it feels to put household objects in order. Those games ask you to make things neat. I wanted one that asks what neat means today.
So every day there's one messy drawer of eight everyday objects, the same for everyone: a rubber duck, a mug, a nail, a toy brick. It has a hidden rule. Slot 1 is the least and slot 8 the most of… something. Drag the objects into an order and press Check. Each slot lights green if it's exactly right (and it locks in place), yellow if it's one or two spots off, and grey if it's further off. You get five checks, then you name the rule from four.
The rules start sensible: size, weight, price, how old the invention is. Then they get silly: how loud each thing is when you drop it at 3 a.m., and how much it would hurt to step on. The reveal shows every object's value with a joke, so you can argue with it. The toy brick is always last on that one. Every drawer you tidy goes on your shelf, and missed days leave a gap.
The hard part was making the silly rules fair. Every object is tagged with its values, and a drawer is only used if its eight values are far enough apart that exactly one order is right, and if the three wrong answers in the final guess would give clearly different orders. A test checks two years of daily drawers and runs a rule-hunting bot through each one.
The drawer and all 31 objects are low-poly three.js, modelled in code from simple shapes with no model packs, and every clack and chime is synthesized. Claude Opus 5.5 built it in one shot. The promo above is the real game playing a scripted solve, starting with the guess everyone makes first: smallest to biggest. It goes grey.