must be one

office-canard games

About this game

must be one is a number puzzle built on a single rule — the one in its name.

A grid of numbers. Four operators. Combine neighboring tiles with arithmetic and collapse the whole board down to a single 1. That's the entire game: all becomes one.

It reads as obvious for about three moves. Then it doesn't.

- One rule, no filler — no twenty-minute tutorial, no menus to dig through. You understand it in seconds and spend the rest of your time actually thinking.
- Always solvable — every stage is generated so that a solution is guaranteed to exist before you ever see it. If you're stuck, that's on you, not the board.
- A climb that keeps widening — early stages stay in single digits; later ones open the range up and the arithmetic gets meaner.
- Free, and quick to pick up. One stage on the train; look up an hour later.

From office-canard — a one-person studio making small, system-first games. If this one gets its hooks in, there are more small games where it came from.

What’s new

Fixed the screen orientation so the game always stays in portrait.