Quinque — a daily word game I built for my father

Quinque is the most personal app I have built. It exists because my 82-year-old father and I both got hooked on the daily five-letter word puzzle — and I did not want him to play it the way the web serves it up.

A shared little ritual

The format is the one everyone knows by now: one secret five-letter word, six guesses, a colour after each guess telling you which letters are right and which are merely in there somewhere. My father and I started comparing results in the morning. It is a small thing, but it became a daily point of contact — the kind of tiny ritual that matters more than it sounds.

What I did not want to hand him

The trouble was the experience around the game. The free web versions are buried in ads, cookie banners, pop-ups and newsletter nags — a minefield between you and a one-minute puzzle. I did not want to put my father through that every morning, watching for the one button that is not a trap. He deserved the game without the tax.

So I built one

Quinque is German, free, with no ads and no tracking. One word per day, the same word for everyone, so there is something to actually compare. It runs natively on iPhone, iPad and the Mac — which is the part that made it click for us: he plays on the iPad, I play on the Mac, and we land on the same puzzle. No account to make, nothing to install around it, nothing trying to monetise the two minutes it takes.

It is a deliberately small app, and that is the point. Not everything has to be a business. This one is a word game I made so my father and I could keep doing a thing we enjoy, cleanly. If you would like the same, it is on the App Store, free.