A meditative take on sudoku that changes with the weather

The Weather Network can be a very useful website, but that’s mostly true when the weather is bad. So when the company began collaborating with the Hearst-owned puzzle platform Puzzmo, it had a specific goal: to get people coming to the site even when it’s nice out. “Why would you check the weather on a sunny day?” veteran game designer Zach Gage remembers asking himself. Eventually, the Puzzmo team came up with an answer in the form of Weather Memoku, an extremely chill game that combines elements of memory, sudoku, and, well, the weather.

“A very important idea was: can we change checking the weather from being a thing you check off your to-do list, to being a chance to take a moment for yourself?” explains Gage.

The game takes place on a 6 x 6 grid, and the goal is to flip over tiles to find matches, much like in a classic game of memory. The twist is that it also follows the rules of sudoku. This means that each of the six symbols appears in each row and column only once, turning Weather Memoku from a pure guessing game to one with a bit of strategy. It’s also incredibly charming, with symbols that change based on the weather. There are cute little frogs on a rainy day and penguins when it snows out. When you complete the puzzle — which will probably take a minute or two — you’re presented with your score in addition to an hourly weather report. You can also share this, much like your Wordle score.

Image: Puzzmo

According to Gage, who previously developed the sudoku app Good Sudoku, Weather Memoku is meant to be an iteration of what he calls “arcade sudoku,” which is basically the standard way of playing without using high-level strategies. Weather Memoku takes the same core gameplay — looking at a grid to figure out where things belong — and streamlines it even further. “Being wrong is part of the game,” Gage explains. “In this game, if you don’t know something and you guess, you can tap anywhere and now you have a new piece of information and your board has changed. It really feels like an interesting evolution of arcade sudoku.”

That streamlined nature is important for what the game is meant to be. Weather Memoku is a fun way to learn a piece of information, but it’s also designed to feel like “a little meditation” that would make you want to keep coming back to the site each day, much like a crossword puzzle or sudoku challenge. “You can have this meditative experience and then when you’re done, you actually have the weather,” says Gage. “You’ve left with a tangible piece of information that’s valuable to you.”

Disclosure: Puzzmo has a partnership with Verge sister site Polygon.