sat with the sunflower deck for a week

Sunflower High-Low looks like the easiest game on the site to get right, since guessing higher or lower is about as simple as a rule gets. What took a full week wasn't the guessing itself but the deck behind it, making sure a streak felt earned rather than either far too easy or frustratingly rare. I ran the numbers by hand more than once before trusting the spreadsheet over my own instinct.

Early versions let streaks run far longer than they should have, since I hadn't accounted properly for how often a middling card like a seven or eight sits right in the center of the deck. Guessing around those cards is close to a coin flip either way, which meant long streaks happened far more often than felt earned. Rebalancing around those middle cards took most of the week on its own.

I spent a few evenings just watching test rounds scroll past, streak after streak, noting where they broke and why. It's oddly calming work, closer to sorting seed packets by size than anything I'd call proper testing. There's a rhythm to watching cards turn over that I didn't expect to enjoy as much as I did.

By the end of the week the streaks felt right, long enough to feel like you'd built something, short enough that the next round still mattered. I named the deck after sunflowers mostly because I was testing it through a window that looked out over a neighbour's patch of them, turning slowly toward whatever sun there was that week.

It's a small game in the end, one card against the last, over and over, but it's become one I quietly enjoy checking in on more than I expected to. Sometimes the plainest games take the longest to get feeling right, and this one certainly did.