What's new in MenteBrillante: three new puzzles, unlimited training and much more content
Where MenteBrillante stands right now — fifteen puzzles, three unlockable by streak, five difficulty levels, unlimited training and four languages. Free to play in the browser today.
MenteBrillante has been growing quite fast for a few months and it is time to say where things stand. If you are new: it is a daily puzzle app — logic, words, memory and arithmetic — that you can play free in your browser right now, with nothing to install and no sign-up needed to try it.
Here is what is new.
Fifteen puzzles, and three of them are earned
The full list: sudoku, word search, crossword, anagram, quick maths, riddles, connections, sentence ordering, who is it?, what year was it?, guess the flag, and the three most recent ones: memory, hidden word and logic sequence.
Those last three are not available from day one. They appear locked with the requirement in plain sight, and they open when you earn your first streak badge, after three days of playing in a row.
The decision was deliberate: the first few days are exactly when people abandon an app, and a concrete, nearby goal helps far more than having everything open at once. Once unlocked they never close again, even if you lose the streak: taking away something already earned feels like a punishment, not an incentive.
Five new challenges a day, plus an extra test
Every day five puzzles are drawn from the ones you have available, and they are the same for everybody. On top of that there is a fixed daily extra test — guess the flag — worth considerably more points.
The draw depends on the date, so if you leave the app open past midnight the five refresh on their own.
Free training, and now with no cap
Alongside the daily challenge there is a training mode: pick whichever puzzle you want and play round after round, without it counting towards your streak or the leaderboard. This is where you practise whatever technique you are learning.
The recent change is that in the puzzles whose content is generated and therefore never runs out — sudoku, memory and logic sequence — training no longer has a limit: you can chain rounds indefinitely. Before, the keep-playing button simply did not appear in those three, which was the place it made least sense to be missing.
In the rest, the number of extra rounds depends on the content available for your level and your language, because we would rather you did not see the same words twice.
Five difficulty levels that rise with you
You do not choose the difficulty: it goes up according to how many puzzles you have solved. The jumps are at 40, 140, 320 and 640 completed puzzles, up to level 5.
We recently fixed something important here: your level is now frozen for the day. Before, if you levelled up halfway through the day, the puzzles you had left changed their content mid-session. Now the day you start is the day you finish.
We also slowed the progression down considerably. It was moving too fast and the difficulty spiked before anyone had had time to enjoy it.
Far more content, in four languages
The content banks have grown several times over this year. The latest expansion added around 1,600 new items spread across the eight banks and the three languages, reinforcing levels 4 and 5 above all, which is where the repetition used to show.
MenteBrillante is available in Spanish from Spain, Latin American Spanish, English and French, and it is not an interface translation: the content itself is different. The riddles, the sentences, the characters and the historical events are adapted to each language, and Latin American Spanish has its own content rather than Spain's with different vocabulary.
Streak, badges, shields and leaderboard
- The streak counts consecutive days played, and grants point bonuses that grow with it.
- Badges are earned for milestones: streaks, puzzles completed of each type, perfect sessions.
- Streak shields save you a day when you have not been able to play. They are spent automatically.
- The leaderboard is global and also per country, so you compete with people near you as well as with everyone.
And one thing we have just changed
Until now, when you finished a puzzle of the day, the only button was «back to home». You finished and off you went.
Now the results screen offers you the next puzzle of the day directly, without going through the home screen, and once you have done all five it offers to keep training on that same puzzle in one tap. It sounds like a minor detail and it changes how the app feels quite a lot: you play in one flow instead of in fits and starts.
And the mobile app?
On its way. Right now the web version is fully playable — the same puzzles, the same content, the same account — and it works well with a mouse and a physical keyboard, which for crosswords and anagrams is even more comfortable than a phone.
The Android and iOS versions are in the last stages of preparation before going up to the stores. As soon as they are there, the download buttons on this very page will stop saying «soon».
In the meantime, you can start playing right now. The account is the same one you will use on mobile, so the streak and the points you build now are not lost.
If you want to get in shape first, have a look at our guides to sudoku, crosswords, anagrams and word searches.