A small company, and one thing on the store.

The entry, as it stands

The aksjeselskap is Norway's ordinary limited form: share capital paid in before trading starts, liability stopping at the company, accounts filed every year whether or not anything happened. Nothing unusual in any of that, and nothing above that a reader has to take on faith — each line is a matter of public record.

One person, start to finish

Nothing is passed between departments here, because the person reading your email is the person who will go and change whatever it was about. That single fact is the operating model, and it is why no claim about teams, capacity or partners appears anywhere on this page.

What that means in practice is Android work: a small game gets designed, written, tested, put on the store, and then kept alive as the platform moves under it. Nothing is commissioned out and nothing is licensed in. The taste here is for puzzles with a rule you can state in one line and a curve that teaches without a tutorial. They run offline, since a network adds nothing to a puzzle, and they want no account, since a puzzle has no reason to learn anything about the person playing it.

One such app is on the store. It is described near the bottom of this page rather than the top, on the view that a company is more than whatever it shipped last.

It is almost never the board that beats you

Here is something about block puzzles worth checking rather than assuming. Take a ten-by-ten board, scatter some filled cells across it at random, and ask a simple question of each shape: is there anywhere left it could go?

Deal yourself some boards below and watch the tally build. Each deal fills the grid afresh and tests all four shapes against it.

The ranking never changes, and it is the whole point. A three-long line and an S-piece will squeeze in almost anywhere; the two-by-two square starts to struggle once the board is well over half full; the three-by-three square is in a category of its own. On a board only three-tenths filled — seventy empty cells out of a hundred — the big square already has nowhere to go about one time in five. At four-tenths filled it fails more often than it succeeds. At half, it fits on barely seven boards in a hundred.

How it was checked: 200,000 boards were generated at each fill level, and every shape was tested against every legal position on every board — 160 positions for the three-long line, 144 for the S-piece, 81 for the small square, 64 for the big one. The right-hand column holds those results. The middle column is your own run of the same experiment, and with enough deals it will drift onto the same numbers.

Treblokk

A warm block puzzle on a wooden workbench. Three shapes sit in the tray at a time and you drag them onto the grid wherever they fit; complete a row or a column and it clears. There is no clock and nothing falls — the game ends only when none of the three shapes can be placed anywhere at all, which makes every round a question of leaving room for whatever comes next.

High score, lines cleared and best combos are kept, and a game in progress is saved so it can be put down and picked up later. It runs entirely offline, keeps no account and shows no advertising — which is why its privacy policy is as short as it turns out to be.

Writing in

General post goes to post@valley.lat. Anything about the app — a bug, a board that behaved oddly, a question about data — goes to kloss@valley.lat. Both land on the same desk; the split only keeps the two sorts of mail apart.

Norwegian and English are equally welcome. Nothing here replies automatically, so if two working days pass in silence, assume the message went astray and send it again.