FocusQ 2: fifteen numbers, ten levels, seventeen years later

In April 2009 the App Store was nine months old, and for our next app we decided to concentrate on how it looked and felt. Kiichi and I wrote a small game, Serge Glikstein drew it, and the post I wrote that week calls it “our first effort at making the UI more intuitive”.

The game was FocusQ. Fifteen numbered spheres on a carbon-fiber board, a clock in a little LCD panel, and one rule, printed on the menu: remove the numbers in ascending order.

It got ten written reviews and every one of them was five stars. “Like whacking moles but with numbers.” “The last level was… evil.” “My fingers hurt from trying to beat level 10.” Then iPhones stopped running 32-bit apps, and FocusQ disappeared from the store.

It is back now, on iPhone and iPad.

The same ten levels

I did not redesign the game. There was nothing to fix in it. The ten levels have the numbers and the time limits they had in 2009, checked against the original one by one.

Level 1 gives you 35 seconds to tap 1 to 15, which is long enough to learn the rule. Level 2 is the same board in nine seconds. From there the numbers stop being consecutive: fives, tens, numbers that all end in 7, three-digit numbers fifty apart. You can no longer look for the next one. You have to compare, and the clock goes down to five and a half seconds.

Level 10 is the one the reviews were about. Every number on it is made of sixes and nines: 6, 9, 66, 69, 96, 99, 666, 669, and on up to 999, which is there twice. You get six seconds. The eye reads 696, the finger goes to 969, and the bubble shudders at you.

The trick with the colors

The spheres come in three colors, and the colors mean something. The five smallest numbers on the board are blue, the middle five are green and the five largest are red. So you are never searching fifteen numbers, only five, three times. That is how a nine-second level becomes possible.

And then there is Color Mix, which was in the first version too. It hands the colors out at random. One reviewer recommended it to the others: “try the color mix mode, this makes it more tough”. It does.

What changed

The clock tells the truth. The old clock counted ticks, a hundred a second, and when the phone was busy a tick could come late, so a time could be a little kinder than it should have been. Now the time is measured from the moment the level starts. It is also written 4.71, not 04:71, because a colon reads as minutes today.

Game Center instead of our server. In 2009, when you finished all ten levels, the game sent your times to a server of ours along with your phone’s identifier, and showed you a web page with the twenty best totals. Nobody should build that now, and the server is long gone. The score is worked out the same way as it was then: each level’s time, multiplied by the level’s number, added up, lowest wins. It goes to a Game Center leaderboard, and each level has one of its own. If you never sign in, the game is all there and nothing leaves your phone.

Today’s board. One board a day, the same fifteen numbers in the same places for everyone, taken from levels 4 to 10 in turn. It has its own leaderboard that starts over each day.

Ten achievements. Most of them you will get by playing. Three you will not: level 10 with Color Mix on, level 10 in under five seconds, and a level from 4 up without one wrong tap.

iPad, and Japanese. The 2009 listing was in English and Japanese, and the Japanese one gave the levels the stage names the game uses now: practice, hard, tricky, evil.

Everything on the screen is drawn again, since the originals were made for a 320 by 480 screen, and the sounds are made by the app itself.

Try level 10

FocusQ is free, with no ads and no account, on iPhone and iPad with iOS 26 or later. Your best times stay on your device. If you played it in 2009, it is the game you remember; level 10 has not become any easier. More on the FocusQ page.