Sortem

Sortem gives a list and a sorting criterion, and nothing else. A colored badge names the day's theme, a two-line instruction says in which order to arrange, and just below a gray line reminds the metric used, which avoids any ambiguity about what the game is actually measuring. Items arrive as stacked cards, each with its emoji on the left, its current rank in small type and its drag handle on the right. A Check Order button closes the board. The top bar holds the rest: an Archive link, a statistics panel, a light-dark toggle and a question mark that opens the rules. The site description announces rotating subjects, countries, cities, foods and others.

1. Read the instruction, and especially the gray line underneath: it is the one that gives the exact metric by which the ranking will be judged.
2. Grab the cards by their handle and drag them until you obtain the desired order.
3. Confirm with Check Order.
4. Start again from the result: correctly placed cards lock, the others must be redistributed, and each attempt leaves its trace under the board.

Sortem compresses a reasoning problem into a single gesture, drag-and-drop, and it is its three-level feedback that saves it from being a lottery. Knowing that a card is in the right zone without being in the right place turns each attempt into a dichotomy, and the rows of points accumulated under the board give the methodical player material to eliminate possibilities cleanly. The other good idea, more discreet, is that gray line that reminds you of the metric: the game never plays on the ambiguity of the instruction, it plays on what you actually know. The star scoring system advantageously replaces counting attempts; it pushes you to think before confirming rather than to brawl until it falls into place.

Three states, each with its icon, listed by the rules panel. Good placement: the card locks and no longer moves. Close: the right zone but not the right slot. Far: completely off. This intermediate degree changes everything compared with a simple right-or-wrong, since it indicates whether to shift a card by one slot or send it to the other end of the pile. Under the board, each past attempt leaves a row of points using the same colors, giving the complete history of attempts at a glance. The final scoring is counted in stars: three for a first-try success, two on the second, one on the third.

Daily Challenge

The day's challenge, dated at the top of the page, with its own theme and metric.

Archive

An Archive link in the top left, which opens past challenges.

• The metric matters more than the theme. The gray line under the instruction says what the sorting is judged on, and two identical lists can be arranged in opposite orders depending on what it specifies.
• The intermediate feedback is the most useful of the three: a card marked as Close is in the right neighborhood, it deserves a shift of one or two slots, not a trip to the other end of the board.
• The rows of points under the board keep the memory of attempts. Before confirming, compare your new arrangement to the previous one so as not to spend a star redoing the same mistake.