Show HN: FuseCells – 2,500 handcrafted levels logic puzzle game with leaderboard

Hi everyone, I built FuseCells, a minimalistic logic puzzle game where every level is handcrafted (no procedural generation). It started as a personal challenge: design a clean rule-set and scale it to thousands of puzzles without losing difficulty balance.

What’s unique: - 2,500 handcrafted levels across multiple grid sizes - Deterministic logic, no guessing required - A rule system inspired by constraint-solving and path-finding concepts - Daily Challenge + leaderboards (I added these to give the game a “reason to come back” without turning it into a grind) - Built end-to-end as a solo dev project

A small data point: after adding Daily Challenge + leaderboards, the game quickly reached ~400 active players (depending on how you define active), and I’m trying to understand what makes them return: competition, habit, or simply puzzle pacing.

Technical notes (if you’re curious): - My internal tools validate solvability using a custom constraint solver - Difficulty is approximated via solver step count - Optimized to run smoothly on low-end devices - Designed for iOS, fully adapted for iPad

I’d love feedback from puzzle lovers, game designers, and anyone into handcrafted logic design - especially on difficulty curve, onboarding clarity, and whether daily + leaderboards add value or feel distracting.