Reference
How StageJury scores a puzzle
Every review here carries a number between 6.1 and 8.7. This page explains what that number is, and — more importantly — what it is not.
The score is one person’s opinion
StageJury is written and maintained by one private individual in New South Wales. There is no editorial team, no testing panel and no rubric applied by committee. When a review calls a board unreadable, it means I could not read it.
That matters because a single perspective has predictable blind spots. I play mostly in short sittings, mostly in portrait, mostly on a mid-range phone, and often outdoors. A game built for a tablet in a dark room will be systematically undersold here, and I try to say so in the review when I notice it happening.
What goes into the number
Four things, weighted informally rather than arithmetically: whether the central rule generates decisions rather than only busywork, how legible the board is under real conditions, how much of your time the application spends on something other than the puzzle, and whether anything is left to learn after the first week.
What deliberately does not go into it: popularity, the rating on Google Play, how well-known the developer is, or how the game looks in a screenshot. The lowest score here belongs to a game whose store listing promises three hundred levels, and the highest to one that never states a level count at all.
Why there are only seven
Because the subject is narrow on purpose. This site covers free Android puzzles about current, light and charge — wires, beams, circuits and the things at either end of them — and seven is roughly how many are worth a full review at any one time.
A longer list would mean either widening the subject or padding it, and both are worse than being small. If a game leaves the store or stops matching that description, it comes off the site rather than staying for the sake of the count.
Where the factual details come from
Ratings, rating counts, developer names, content ratings and last-update dates are taken from each game’s Google Play listing on the Australian storefront. Every one of them was checked on 10 September 2026, and that date is printed on each review for exactly this reason.
Level counts are quoted only where the developer states one. Where a table cell reads "Not stated on Play", that is not an oversight — the store listing does not publish a number, and inventing one would be worse than admitting the gap.
What the score cannot tell you
It cannot tell you which kind of thinking you enjoy. Tracing a route, computing a reflection, planning under a budget and nudging a continuous simulation are genuinely different activities, and being good at one predicts remarkably little about the others.
That is why every review spends more words on what a game asks of you than on any overall judgement. If you read one section of a review, read that one — the number at the top is the least useful thing on the page.
Written by Angus Fraser. Questions and corrections go to desk@stagejury.com.