[gus_massa]

> I made this game for my children to play

Mathematician here. It's fun, but it's quite hard! How old are your children?

[spoiler alert?]

I finally solved it in 4 steps. It needs a lot of backtracking planning. I has to guess which will be the last expression and try to reach the numbers that it used.

I don't play too much Wordle, but my approach was just trying to find a word that is not to stupid (like reusing a lot of letters that are already grey) and just hopping that that the new info will make the next step easier.

[fgeiger]

> It needs a lot of backtracking planning. I has to guess which will be the last expression and try to reach the numbers that it used.

I ended up creating a mental factorization table of the target number with only the available numbers as factors. That pretty "quickly" lead to a solution in only three steps.

I put the "quickly" in scare quotes because I essentially brute forced the problem.

[rntksi]

I'm pretty sure this is the only way to solve it (factorization table). I don't see how else?

[Someone]

Hard? I found the hard one fairly easy, and don’t think I accidentally spotted the solution early. For difficult, I would expect at least one division, as in (ax+b)/(c-d)

But yes, I factored the result in my head. I would have done the same with (result ± any of the other numbers), if necessary.

Also, for the simple one, I immediately recognized 243 as a power of 3, so maybe, I’m not in the target group ;-)

[kirchhoff]

I'm still working on the difficulty levels. I think recognising factors of either the target number or nearby numbers is key.

[soneca]

I found it hard to. But it didn’t plan, I was going kind of trial and error. I found this 4 steps solution after certainly more than 50 tries

[kirchhoff]

There is a kids mode in the settings. Today's one is hard, I must admit (though it can be done in 3 steps) - they did well when I was testing the site!