Puzzle games without ads or lives: how free games make money, and what Millrace sells instead

A free puzzle game still has to be paid for somehow. The question worth asking before you install one is who pays, and with what. Here are the common models, what each asks of you, and where each shows up on an App Store page. After that, the complete price list for Millrace, and the reasoning behind it.

How free puzzle games make money

Many games combine several of these. Lives with a timer, boosters for sale and ads for extra moves are a common bundle in level-based puzzle sagas. Paid-upfront games are the other route: you pay once on the product page and there is usually nothing else to buy. Threes is one, and its comparison page covers how its paid and free editions differ.

Three places on an App Store page tell you most of this:

1. Next to the Get button. “In-App Purchases” there means something is for sale.
2. The In-App Purchases list, further down the page. Item names and prices give the model away: lives, refills, coins, boosters, a remove-ads item, a monthly price.
3. App Privacy. This is what the developer declares about data, in four headings: Data Used to Track You, Data Linked to You, Data Not Linked to You, and Data Not Collected. Tracking, in Apple’s definition, means linking data from the app with other companies’ data for targeted advertising or ad measurement, or sharing it with data brokers.

Recent reviews fill in the rest.

What Millrace sells: the complete list

Millrace has no ads, no lives and no subscription. It sells cosmetic themes, undo tokens and a tip, and this is every item:

The four packs bought separately cost $7.96, so the Complete Collection is cheaper. Theme purchases restore with your Apple Account. There is no subscription. Apple derives the prices for other storefronts and shows your local currency at checkout.

What is free: all 64 campaign levels, Freeplay, the daily board, Hint, the Coach, Game Center and the Classic theme, one of seventeen. A paid theme can be previewed on your own board for five moves before you decide.

Where undo tokens fit, and where they don’t

Undo tokens are the one thing Millrace sells that touches play, and the closest thing it has to a booster, so here are their exact rules.

• Inside a level, Undo is free and unlimited. It never touches your tokens. After a failed run, the card’s main button is “Undo that move”, and restarting a level costs nothing either.
• Tokens are spent only in Freeplay, the endless board, where tiles spawn at random. By default the app asks before it spends one.
• Free tokens arrive on their own. One arrives each day while you hold fewer than three. Opening the app on consecutive days builds a streak, and the milestones at 3, 7, 14 and 30 days pay out 2, 5, 10 and 20 tokens, once each.
• Running out doesn’t interrupt anything. Tapping Undo with no tokens opens a sheet with the three bundles and a “Not now” button. The game carries on either way.

Hint is never rationed or sold. In a level, it comes from the same solver that verified the level, as the first move of a shortest line from where you stand. The strategy guide covers how to use it, and how to need it less.

Why there are no lives or ads

The project’s planning document set three rules for how the game earns its keep: never gate the base game, never make undo mandatory, and no paywalls mid-run. Everything in the price list follows from them.

Lives would break the first rule in the most direct way. A lives system makes failure cost time: you lose, and you wait or pay. In Millrace a loss costs one tap on Undo. The comment above that button in the source puts it plainly: the point of a fail state “is that it costs you a thought, not a run.” The levels are hard on purpose, as how they’re made explains. A hard level with a lives meter attached rewards waiting, not thinking.

Free Undo needed one guard. When a run fails, the card can say which move made the position unwinnable, but only afterwards, never live. A live warning plus free Undo would turn every level into swipe, undo, swipe until something sticks, and you’d reach the answer without understanding it.

Ads were ruled out by design and are now ruled out by construction. An ad has to come from somewhere, and Millrace contains no networking code: it never uploads or downloads anything itself. It links no third-party SDKs, there is no account, and Apple’s privacy label for the app reads Data Not Collected. Game Center and purchases talk to Apple; nothing else in the app connects anywhere. The privacy policy has the details.

What this model gives up

A game that sells only optional items depends on some players choosing to buy something they don’t need. That is the whole trade. The design has other limits too. There are 64 levels, not thousands, and each one was generated, solved exhaustively and screened before it shipped. Progress stays on the device and doesn’t sync. If you want a long saga with events, the Two Dots comparison is fair about where Two Dots does better, and how its lives work.

A checklist for any free puzzle game

Before installing, five questions answer most of it:

1. Does failing cost anything: a life, energy, or time spent waiting?
2. Can every level be finished without buying anything?
3. Are hints and undos rationed, and are they sold?
4. What does the In-App Purchases list contain?
5. What does the App Privacy section declare?

For Millrace: failing costs nothing; every level can be finished free; hints are never rationed, and undos are free inside levels, with tokens sold only for Freeplay; the list holds themes, undo bundles and a tip; and the label reads Data Not Collected. The app page has the rest.