The person
I am Noah Williams, a casual game designer based in New Zealand. I have spent about nine years on mobile puzzle projects — first placing obstacles on someone else's grid, then owning the balancing spreadsheets, and eventually being the person other teams called when a chapter's retention fell off a cliff and nobody could explain why.
Ivory Cinder started as the document I kept rewriting for each new team: a plain explanation of how these boards actually resolve and why one tuning change makes a level feel unfair. Publishing it turned out to be more useful than emailing it, and applying it to specific published games turned out to be more useful still.
How the guides are made
Every game is installed from Google Play onto an ordinary mid-range Android phone and played for at least 150 levels before a word is written. No emulator, no modified builds, no publisher-supplied version, and no money spent during the writing period — a guide written by someone who bought their way past the hard levels is not a guide to the game most people play.
Where a widely repeated tip turns out to be folklore, the guide says so. Where the game changed after publication, the page gets updated and dated.
Independence
There are no affiliate links on this site. The Google Play buttons are ordinary store links and earn nothing. No publisher has paid for, reviewed or been given advance sight of anything published here, and none has any relationship with this site. If that ever changes it will be disclosed at the top of the page concerned.
Screenshots and icons are the official assets each developer publishes on their own store listing, reproduced for review and identification. All rights remain with them.
Who the consulting is for
- Players stuck on a specific level who want an actual explanation rather than a video.
- Solo and hobbyist developers building a first match-3 and wondering why it feels flat.
- Small studios with a live game and one chapter losing players faster than its neighbours.
- Students and researchers writing about game economies who need a working model.
What this site is not
Ivory Cinder is a guide blog that sells PDF documents. It is not a casino, offers no gambling, betting or wagering, hosts no playable game, accepts no deposits and pays out no money or prizes. Every game covered is a free casual entertainment puzzle on Google Play with no cash prizes of any kind.
I also do not sell certainty. Boards are randomised, and no guide changes that. What a guide does is remove the avoidable mistakes — which, in my experience, is most of the gap between a frustrating session and a good one.