Roll & Win — Solitaire Grand Harvest (Playtika)

The farm was scenery. You looked at it; you never touched it. Roll & Win was the first feature with its own screen and a new game design experience alongside the core loop — an opening to broaden the world's theme and story.

• A new camera on a familiar place. I reviewed the 2D top-down farm and designed a 3D, close-up forest clearing. Same world, far more personal vantage.
• Something to tend. The player grows a centre object — an additional, more intimate interaction with a single object in the farm, and a more personal experience than harvesting in the meta loop.

• Low-skill game of chance: roll, move, collect. No levels, no skill gate, no sting.
• Zen sound, short moves, light copy — come and go as you please.
• Promote without pressure: noticeable, never enforced.

Two options on the table:

• A — challenging near-miss. Land the right tiles to grow the centre piece. Real tension.
• B — challenge-less laps. Complete laps to progress. Smoother, safer.

I argued for A, backed by a case study from another Playtika team. I was overruled — the conviction was that our players wanted a quick, non-challenging break: boosters for the main loop, nothing more. For an audience we couldn't yet measure, that was defensible. I built B properly.

A year on, we switched to A, having learned the same lesson ourselves.

No precedent existed for how a second currency behaves inside the core game. I designed a component that lives in the level, built to communicate where the player stands in their progression toward what they're collecting — while balancing what they need to know, and when. Two states did the work:

• Idle — collapsed. Present, but quiet enough to stay out of the way.
• Collecting — opens as currency flies in. A progress bar fills toward the next roll.

The player always knew a roll was getting closer; no hand was ever interrupted to say so.

Postscript: the Tournament later needed a model that scales to several currencies at once — a brief in-play moment — and that became the game's standard. Roll & Win solved the instance; the Tournament generalized it.

A small set of replaceable UI elements — lean enough to keep reskins fast, broad enough for a genuinely new theme each cycle, centre object included. Built with dev rather than handed to them: a simplified, code-optimized build that was cheap to reskin by construction.

Revenue slid. Some of that is fatigue — but the main diagnosis was the gameplay itself: a run ended, and players simply replayed it. No grand finish, no giant prize to build toward, and less challenge than this audience turned out to want.

The brief was to raise the ceiling while keeping dev cost short. The UX and game mechanics redesign brought back the near-miss model I'd argued for at the start — stepping up the challenge.

• The jackpot — a prize growing with every move, collected at the end. Prototyping settled what it should be: I explored a secondary object beside the centre piece, and landed on the centre object itself — the thing players had been growing all along, and the clearest read for both UX and gameplay.
• A final near-miss task to claim it — new game mechanics that upped the challenge: collect items from the board to win.
• Improvements along the way — the staged progression bar made clearer, driven by player feedback from the community and social.
• Reused layout and assets — the upgrade fit inside the original budget.

• Being right early isn't the same as being persuasive. I had evidence from another team and still lost to a prevailing belief about our players. A year of revenue data made the case I couldn't.
• The cautious ship is defensible; treating it as permanent isn't. Option B was a reasonable bet for an audience we couldn't measure. Never revisiting it would have been the real failure.
• A feature's second design is as much a design job as its first.
• Solve the instance, then generalize it.