Solar Puzzles 1.6: a new game, and the first thing we ever sold
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Solar Puzzles 1.6 is out. It brings a sixth thing to play and the first thing this app has ever charged for — and the second of those took far more deciding than the first.
What’s new
- Planet Trails, a new game. Draw one unbroken flight through every sector of a sky chart, touching the numbered beacons in flight-plan order and landing on the world the trip is for. Forty charts, no clock, and nothing you can get wrong: a wrong move simply does not happen, and dragging back along your own trail rubs it out.
- The Space Pass, an optional monthly subscription. It opens Planet Trails, a Time Race mode in Planet Blocks, real photographs throughout the Space Museum, hearts that refill twice as fast, and two extra tries in Cosmic Marbles.
- The hearts reminder. One optional notification, telling you the tank has filled. Off until you switch it on, offered once, and the only notification the game will ever send.
- iPad turns sideways. Every screen centres in landscape, and Planet Blocks gets a layout of its own for the wider frame.
What a children’s game may sell
Everything that shipped free is still free, and that is not a slogan — it is the constraint the whole tier was designed around. Not one game, level, mission or museum exhibit moved behind the pass. What is sold is new: a game that did not exist, a mode held back rather than given away and taken back, photographs nobody had seen.
Two things we decided not to sell. There are no ads, in any build that reaches either store. And no heart is ever sold on its own: the pass shortens the wait between runs from twenty minutes to ten, but the twenty-minute wait is what the free game has always had and still has. Selling the wait itself would turn a pace into a price tag, which is the trade this game has refused since 1.5.
A paid tier that takes something away is a different product wearing the old one’s name. The test we kept applying: could a player who pays nothing tell that 1.6 shipped, other than by the new things appearing locked?
The same date, two opposite meanings
The pass is access, not a possession — a right held until a date, whatever the date came from. That model was built long before there was anything to buy, and it survived contact with two real stores almost unchanged. Almost.
What it could not do was answer the only question a paying parent actually has. A subscription that renews on the fifth and one that was cancelled and closes on the fifth carry the same date and opposite news. Show the countdown to the first, and the app tells somebody who is fully paid up that everything is about to shut. That is the worse of the two available lies, so the pass now stores a second flag beside the date, and the screen has two faces: a calm Renews 30 Sep with no clock at all, or the ticking digits and a plain sentence about what closes when they run out.
Android forced the same lesson from the other end. Google Play tells a device whether a subscription is active and whether it will renew — and never when it ends. So on Android the pass is held with no end date at all, for exactly as long as Play keeps listing it. Two stores, two shapes, one screen that has to be honest in both.
The sum was never the patronising part
Apple’s Kids Category requires a parental gate in front of any purchase: an adult-level task, which in practice means a multiplication a six-year-old cannot do. That part is not ours to remove, and we would not want to — a purchase should never happen by a stray tap.
But the screen used to open with Ask a grown-up, which is an instruction aimed at a child. An adult buying a subscription for themselves was being told to go and find an adult. That part was ours, and it is gone: it now says Grown-up check and states the rule instead of giving an order.
The numbers shrank too, for a reason worth writing down. The gate is a speed bump, not a lock. Any child with a calculator, an older sibling or a voice assistant gets through any sum we could set, which is precisely why the rule is worded as without the parent’s knowledge rather than impossible. Difficulty therefore buys no safety at all and is paid for entirely by the adult. What does the work is the operation, not the arithmetic: times tables arrive years after the age this game is rated for.
When something in an app feels aimed only at children, check whether the requirement or merely the wording is doing it. It is usually the wording, and the wording was always free to change.
One more thing
While 1.6 was rolling out, Google’s teachers and children’s media specialists finished reviewing the app: Solar Puzzles is now Teacher Approved, rated for ages 6–8 and 9–12, and carries the badge on Google Play. Their notes mention art and animation, ease of use, sparking curiosity and critical thinking. We did not ask for the age range to widen; it is a pleasant coincidence that they widened it in the same week we stopped describing the game as being only for children.
Get Solar Puzzles — free to play, no ads, nothing collected, every puzzle offline. On both stores.
