I have been a longtime fan of Button Shy, ever since someone sold me copies of Turbo Drift and Find Your Seats to make up for losing the Love Letter I’d intended to buy off them (which ended up being a much better deal for me, honestly). I especially enjoy their broad selection of solo games since each is equal parts portable and replayable. The Daily Weather is Button Shy’s latest offering, and it certainly continues that trend, a tiny package for a game that offers a unique challenge every day of the year.
Rules & Components
The rules are super light, even for Button Shy, and the example graphics make it very easy to jump right into the game. I didn’t have any issues learning the game, which only took a few minutes before I started my first weather forecast.
The iconography, including the cell backgrounds, is all very easy to read. The art is very cute and fits the theme well. I do wish that there had been some thematic context for what the different backgrounds represent (maybe the weather’s intensity?), but as a light puzzle game, that’s not really necessary.
Gameplay
Playing The Daily Weather follows some simple tile (or card, in this case) rules where you have to overlap at least one identical cell—both icon and background—with each card. After playing all 6 cards, only the correct month and date for the day should be visible. Each real-life day will also affect your setup steps, additional goal, and scoring condition.
This isn’t the first time that Button Shy has published a game that changes with the real date—check out Chris Anderson’s Tempus Quest for more of that—but Daily Weather is easily the most readily accessible. Just arrange the four cards that make up today’s date, shuffle a few cards, and you’re good to go. While some days’ challenges are harder than others (I don’t want to talk about Sunday, Feb. 8th), it takes less than 30 seconds to reset and give the day another try. Plus, that just makes it all the more satisfying when you do find a solution.
While meeting the goals of the game—only showing today’s date and matching the seasonal weather pattern—there’s also a scoring condition that changes by the day as well. However, it really only lets you “win more” in a way. It makes sense; with so many possible combinations for the day’s setup, some are bound to have more or less scoring potential than others. Sometimes it feels like a miracle that you even met the base goals! I don’t personally like “highscore chasing” in solo games as your ultimate goal, but it does provide some metric for comparing success if you ever want to replay a day. You can also compare it to the scores of other players in the official Button Shy Discord server (which is one of the most pleasant communities I’ve ever been a part of) and see if there was room for you to improve.
There are six double-sided cards you’ll be able to place each day. Since you can’t flip them after shuffling, there’s a bit of determinism there that may make a particular deck impossible to use as a solution. This is somewhat speculative, as I could just be very dumb and miss a potential solution, but it’s something I dislike about several Solitaire rulesets. I’m not overly fond of playing a game if I can lose as soon as I start dealing. It never really feels like that in The Daily Weather, since each card has so many potential options available for me to misplay. And even if it really is the case, the games often take less than 10 minutes to play to completion. If you lose, just reshuffle and try again.
The Daily Weather isn’t a highly engaging, mechanically complex game, but it’s certainly one of the lightest solo games I’ve played, Button Shy or otherwise. It’s easy enough to work it into your daily routine: trying to solve the day’s puzzle while sipping your beverage of choice (I’m partial to fresh-brewed tea). I’ll probably be keeping my own copy right by my table to go with breakfast each day.
