How a flea-market stall became a website

Marisol Quereda and Davit Sarkisyan · written from a kitchen table.

Before any of this was a website, it was stall 14: a wobbly folding table that Marisol set up every Saturday at the city flea market, stacked with secondhand jigsaws, chipped board games and the kind of pocket logic puzzles that used to come free in a cereal box. Davit ran the coffee cart two pitches along, and he had a habit of abandoning his own customers to come and lose an argument about the fastest way to solve a fifteen-tile slide.

When the market was sold off for redevelopment last winter, the stall had to go. We boxed up the games, and somewhere between the third and fourth box it occurred to us that the puzzles we loved most weren't really objects at all — they were just rules. Rules you could rebuild. So Davit, who writes code for a living during the week, knocked together a rough sliding-tile game one evening to see if it still felt right on a screen. It did. That prototype became Riverstones.

Where the otter came from

The otter is not deep. Davit drew it on the back of a market receipt to fill an empty corner of the first page, Marisol refused to let him delete it, and now it's the whole brand. We like that it looks faintly unbothered, because that's the mood we're after: pick a puzzle up, put it down, no harm done either way. We keep it because it makes us smile, not because a focus group told us to.

The four things we won't budge on

Running a stall taught us that the best version of a small thing is the honest one. Four habits carried straight over:

Play, then leave. There are no streaks to protect, no daily login, no badge designed to drag you back tomorrow. Open a puzzle for three minutes on the bus and close the tab with a clear conscience.

What you do stays with you. We never set up accounts, and we never will. Whatever times or best scores a game remembers, it remembers in your own browser — nothing is sent to us, because we built nowhere to send it.

Free, and that's the end of the sentence. No price, no upsell, no ads wedged between you and the board. The stall was cheap on purpose; the site is free for the same reason.

Small on purpose. We'd rather ship one puzzle that feels exactly right than ten that almost do. Two of us, two games, and a third one half-drawn — that's the entire operation, and we're in no hurry to grow it.

How a puzzle actually gets made

Davit owns the rules and the code; Marisol owns the look, the words, and the final say on whether something is fun. It usually starts as a paper sketch on the kitchen table, becomes an ugly working version, and then gets quietly fussed over for a fortnight until the small things — how a tile slides, how a light dims — feel kind rather than fiddly. When it stops annoying both of us, it goes up.

Today that's two finished puzzles — Riverstones and Fireflies — with a little picture-logic game still in pencil. If one of them brightened a dull commute, or you've a gentle idea for the next, the contact page reaches us directly.

Thanks for reading the long version. Go solve something small.

— Marisol & Davit