I made a small game to formalize what I do when I find myself bored and staring at a clock. Take the time, and make an equation out of it. Highest value equation wins. The first version just used the time, but I expanded it to include the date, and I think it makes for a pretty fun open-ended daily math puzzle.

Some design notes (if you'll indulge me!):

Factorials presented an issue, 0!=1 is pretty important (some times are impossible to solve without this!), but it allows for arbitrarily large equations, which ruins the scoring of the game. To side-step this, the game only allows one ! per equation. This is occasionally frustrating, but it guarantees that the game is always winnable, while not being trivial.

There are a few quality of life features, many of them relating to parens. When you place a paren, the matching paren is automatically picked up. When you remove one, the matching one is removed. The parens use rainbow brackets, and remembers the order that they were placed in, so the colors don't shift unexpectedly. Symbol placement is limited to "legal" spaces; sqrt( can never be placed to the right of the rightmost digit, for instance.

The scoring system took a few iterations to get right, initially I wanted to reward players for using as few symbols as possible (golf-style), but this was difficult to communicate and made points more abstract. Collapsing the game down to score = value makes for a system which is much more intuitive.

Finally, I added a wordle-like "share" feature, which uses clocks to show what percentile your answer is in.

I think that my score on today's daily is impossible to beat.