‘Digits’ Is A Great New Numbers Game To Add To Your Puzzle Playlist

The New York Times has another excellent little puzzle game to add to your daily Wordle. This one, however, taps into your math skills rather than your vocabulary. Still, I find the two rather complimentary. Both are good exercise for your little grey cells.

The game is called Digits and it’s still in beta. You can play it right here. Every day you have a series of five numbers to solve. Each stage of the puzzle gives you the total number that you need to come up with, as well as several numbers below that you can use to reach the goal number.

The image at the top of this post is taken from yesterday’s challenge. You can see in the top left corner all five of the numbers: 69, 135, 256, 379, and 481. The three gold stars under each one mean that I solved all of them with flying colors (I’ve never gotten fewer than three gold stars but I assume that guessing wrong docks you stars, but I’ve also gotten three stars when I know I can solve it in fewer steps, so who knows).

Here’s what this stage of the challenge looked like before I started combining numbers:

The goal number here is 135. I have six numbers in little circles below that number that I need to use in order to add up to 135. I do not need to use all six. The goal is to get to 135 in as few steps as possible. You can add, subtract, multiply or divide however you please so long as you get to the goal number.

In the image at the top of this post, I’ve already combined a few numbers. I multiplied 3 x 25 for a total of 75 and then 4 x 15 for a total of 65. The numbers I now have are:

Now just add 60 to 75 and you’re done! I didn’t even bother using the 7 or 11, but there could be a way to use those numbers to get to 135 also.

The challenge ramps up as you go. Here’s the final stage of yesterday’s challenge. The total is 481:

You clearly can’t simply add all these numbers together and get to 481. But it’s also not at all clear which numbers need to be multiplied or added in order to get to the goal number, either. Here’s what I did to solve.

First I multiplied 25 x 18 which equals 450.

Then I multiplied 14 x 2 which equals 28. To this, I added 3 for a total of 31.

450 + 31 = 481. Again, I only used five of my original numbers, leaving 19 out entirely. The 19 was a distraction. Or was it?

You see, there’s another way! 19 x 25 = 475. 3 x 2 = 6. 475 + 6 = 481. That’s just three steps instead of four, which is an even better way to solve this than the way I went about it the first time. I’m already feeling better at arithmetic! Which is kind of like being better at math! Huzzah!

I just discovered another fun numbers–and-words game called Numbword which you can read about right here. It’s a fun, free puzzle game that combines Wordle with Sudoku.

What puzzle games are you into these days? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.

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