Designing a puzzle with no words: how Tare teaches its rules, and what accessibility took

Note: Tare has 200 levels in ten chapters of twenty. Chapter I, onboarding included, is free, and one purchase unlocks the other 180. This post is the launch-day essay, written when Tare had 80 levels.

Every level of Tare is a hanging mobile that you balance with weights, and none of the 200 has a word on the playing field. There is no tutorial screen, hand icon or arrow. The puzzle had to teach the rule, the hidden weights and the cards that reveal them on its own. And because there is no text to label, accessibility couldn’t be a layer of button labels added at the end.

What the first levels teach, and how

Two signals run through every level.

Every known weight states its value as a numeral. A hidden “?” is always drawn at one fixed size, whatever it weighs.

A full but wrong board shudders once, with a soft haptic on iPhone. There is no red, no buzzer and no failure screen. A drop that misses every hook doesn’t even get a shudder; the piece glides back to its slot.

Levels with one way forward

The rule for the first five levels was no text, no hand icons and no tutorial overlay. Each level offers so little that the next thing to try is the lesson. Level 1 has exactly one possible move, and it solves the level. By level 5 you have dragged, filled, swapped and re-hung, because level 5 can’t be solved without moving the piece it starts with.

Two wordless helpers sit around those levels:

• A teaching line, on levels 1 to 5 only. After 15 seconds without a touch, a faint line arcs from a piece to a hook. It shows a move, not the solution.
• A short introduction for each kind of card. The first time a card appears, and again for the first secret, tilt, sum and ratio, the room dims on the card and the pieces it quotes, and a short wordless sequence shows what the card means. None is saved: the game works out what you’ve seen from the levels you’ve solved.

No channel leaks a hidden weight

The deduction only works if the game keeps its own secrets. A beam carrying an unsolved “?” never settles, because, as the design notes put it, “the scale cannot weigh a secret”. How to solve a balance puzzle explains why that matters. The same rule holds elsewhere. The “?” bubble is always one size, and VoiceOver calls the piece hidden and never says a number.

What accessibility took

With no words on the canvas, labelling the buttons covers almost nothing, so the board itself had to become something a screen reader can walk.

Tests check all of this. One fills every hook of every shipped level using voice actions alone. Another plays levels 1 to 3 as a player who cannot see the screen: it knows only what an empty hook and a level beam sound like, and how to put a piece back. Others check the contrast of the high-contrast colours and that every weight shape can be told apart without colour.

Where the words went

Tare does use words in places. Settings, the chapter names (The Hang, The Secret, The Cascade, and the rest), the world names, and the unlock screen all have them, and so does everything VoiceOver says.

A test keeps the canvas to its rule: it reads the code that draws a level and fails if it finds any text other than a weight’s numeral and the “?”.

The plan had been English-only VoiceOver at launch, on the reasoning that the gameplay is wordless. That holds for the canvas, but for a player who can’t see it, the spoken clauses are the game, and shipping an English game inside a store listing written in 50 languages was where the wordless argument broke down. On 20 September I decided the whole app would ship in all 50 languages. Every spoken line was already a whole clause with placeholders, so a translator could reorder it.

Right-to-left languages turned up a different problem. In Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu, the system mirrored the drawing of the mobile but not the drag, so a player had to touch the mirror image of a piece to lift it. A mobile is a physical toy, so it is now drawn left to right in every language while the menus mirror, and VoiceOver’s “left arm” matches what’s on screen.

Decisions that changed late

• Sound off by default, 20 September. I played the finished build and didn’t want its sounds on unless a player asks. That cost a teaching channel, since sound had been part of how the first levels taught. Level 1’s lesson now rests on the beam going level and still, which works because the level allows no other action.
• The idle line became a teacher only, 19 September. It used to appear by itself after 8 seconds on every level, and it made levels too easy. Now it appears unasked only on levels 1 to 5. Elsewhere, hints are a Settings switch, off by default: each press draws one line from the next piece to its hook, never for the last piece, and the first press on an attempt costs that attempt’s third star.

Tare is a free download for iPhone and iPad on iOS and iPadOS 18 or later. Chapter I’s 20 levels, onboarding included, are free to keep, and one $2.99 purchase unlocks the other 180; why it is priced that way is its own post. If you came for the rule-learning, compare Baba Is You, whose rules are built out of word blocks, and DragonBox Algebra, which also teaches through balancing. For the wider field, see the best logic puzzle games for iPhone.