Tournament — Solitaire Grand Harvest (Playtika)

Tournament — the first competitive feature in Solitaire Grand Harvest (Playtika).

Recap

Role: Senior Product Designer, Playtika
Owned: market research, UX flows, prototyping (MVP + post-MVP); UI art direction; sprint planning; close coordination with product and development.
Team: directed a 4-person craft team — illustrator, animator, copywriter, sound designer — and coordinated continuously with the product manager and the dev team.
Duration: ~3 months (MVP + post-MVP additions)
Platform: Mobile — phone + tablet
Tools: Photoshop, Adobe XD, After Effects, Miro, Jira

A recurring, reskinnable tournament that dropped a live competition into a casual solitaire game's core loop — without disrupting the quiet, single-player habit it was built around. It shipped as the game's first competition feature, became a flagship event reissued every 1–2 months (rebranded with a fresh reskin each time), and lifted revenue during each limited-time run.

Problem

Solitaire Grand Harvest is a casual solitaire game with ~1.9M daily active users whose habit is calm, single-player play. The business wanted a competitive layer to lift engagement and revenue during limited-time events — but a tournament is a foreign object inside a relaxed casual loop.

The core problem: introduce the game's first competition feature without disrupting a core loop millions play every day, and design it so it serves two audiences at once —

Competitive players who want to compete, climb, and win.
Casual players who want the core game left undisturbed and shouldn't feel pushed — or left out.

Solving it meant tackling several challenges at once:

Welcome intrusion vs. undisturbed play — making the tournament feel present and rewarding without disrupting the casual player's routine.
Integration — a feature that touches numerous areas and layouts of the existing game, staying recognizable as one feature across every screen so it never looks fragmented.
Art-style fit — matching the look of a game built by a different company.
Player orientation — clear communication across the many screens, so players always knew which stage the tournament was in and where they stood within it.
Fairness — the competition had to feel fair.
A reusable system — swappable so the team could rebrand and relaunch it on a cycle.

Research

Market research — how other games fold limited-time competitive events into an existing loop: what mechanics to borrow, and what tends to break a casual audience.
Mapped SGH's core loop, UX flow, and user journey — locating the key areas a player visits regularly and gauging their focus and availability to accept new communication, so tournament elements could be placed for a cohesive experience while keeping the core loop intact.

The core tension — welcome intrusion vs. undisturbed play. A tournament isn't purely non-disruptive. During an event, players collect a special currency between the solitaire cards, and that collection has to feel fun and visible — signaling that something extra is happening in their game. The feature therefore needs some intrusion into core gameplay, while still not disrupting the player's routine solitaire habit. Balancing that — and serving both the competitive players who lean in and the casual players who'd rather ignore it — was the design problem that drove the integration, notifications, and state handling below.

Artefacts from the messaging tests run with players — TODO(caption): Testing the state messaging with players, to confirm each state read clearly

Design process

Integrating without breaking the loop

This is where the central tension gets resolved, through two placement decisions:

Communications went on strategic, high-traffic screens — the spots the mapped journey flagged as high pass-through, where players are receptive to the message.
The tournament currency dropped in-game at the right moments — enough to signal something extra beyond regular play, for engaged and casual players alike, without derailing a hand. I iterated on its on-screen treatment (a brief collect animation vs. a persistent element that stays visible during play) to strike that balance — and built it to support future currencies coexisting with other in-game features.

A reusable standard, not a one-off. Beyond this feature, I wrote guidelines for cross-game additions, so future features could strike the same balance instead of each one fighting the core loop on its own terms.

The tournament currency appearing as a brief collect animation during play — TODO(caption): One treatment: a brief collect animation that resolves and gets out of the way

The tournament currency appearing as a persistent element that stays on screen during play — TODO(caption): The other: a persistent element that stays visible through the hand

Keeping players oriented

The core challenge here was clarity: at any point, a player needed to understand which stage the tournament was in and where they stood within it. I mapped this as a full matrix of event states (live / ending / ended / offline) × player states (non-participant / participant / ranked), designed the communications for each, and tested the messaging with users to confirm every state read clearly. Among the user flows this covered:

Onboarding a player — announcement, threshold handling, and a tutorial to bring a new participant up to speed.
Tournament ended — an announcement with the player's rank and, optionally, a prize — kept clear for players who returned after the event had ended.

TODO(caption): Announcing the event to a non-participant

Player customization — Lucky Card (post-MVP)

A post-MVP addition that let players pick a Lucky Card which yields tournament currency during play, making them feel they influence their own progression. The challenge was keeping it discoverable without overexposing it or crowding the tournament onboarding flow. The solution served both sides: players who wanted to engage picked their own card, while those who didn't had one selected for them.

The Lucky Card picker showing the cards available to choose from — TODO(caption): Choosing the card that yields tournament currency — and having one chosen for you if you skip it

Reusable / reskinnable UI system

I planned a replaceable-element UI so the event could be rebranded each time it resurfaced. The trade-off: enough swappable assets to give real creative freedom for each new brand, but few enough that producing a fresh reskin stayed fast. I also built a fallback skin for cycles where there wasn't time to produce new event branding.

The tournament interface in one seasonal skin — TODO(caption): One skin over the shared tournament layout

The same tournament interface in a different seasonal skin — TODO(caption): A second skin, same layout — what made the event reissuable

Fairness & competitive integrity (the heart of the design)

The hardest question wasn't how to run a competition — it was how to make one feel fair to a casual crowd. Through repeated iteration and UX/product discussions with the PM, two threads came out of it:

Fair grouping (shipped). Using player segmentation, players were matched by engagement level into tournaments of up to ~50, so a casual or returning player wasn't crushed by a heavy or paying one and left feeling it was pointless. It was presented seamlessly — the player just saw "their" tournament of similar players, with no visible machinery.
Re-engaging low-ranked players (explored, didn't ship). We experimented with ways to pull players near the bottom back up the board — for example, giving them a mini challenge that would boost them up. This didn't make the cut.

Final design

TODO(caption): Leaderboard and currency collection, the two screens a player lives in

Outcome

Shipped as Solitaire Grand Harvest's first competition feature.
Left the core casual loop intact — the competition layered on without disrupting the routine play casual players rely on.
Became a recurring flagship event — reissued every 1–2 months, each time reskinned and rebranded on the same underlying system.
Lifted revenue and engagement during each limited-time run.
Left a reusable standard — cross-game integration guidelines future features could follow to layer onto the core loop without disrupting it.

Reflection

Designing a competitive feature for a casual audience is mostly a fairness-and-restraint problem. The wins came from grouping players fairly and staying out of the core loop — not from adding more competition.
Building for the full state matrix up front (player × event states, including the "away" cases) is what made the event feel trustworthy and legible.
Designing it as a reusable, reskinnable system turned one feature into a repeatable revenue event — a systems decision with a direct business payoff.