Meowdoku!
A cat logic puzzle: one cat per colored region, row and column, none touching
First principle
Logic pays out in certainty: each cat is proven, not guessed. Meowdoku took LinkedIn's one a day Queens puzzle, swapped queens for cats, served it level after level and charges a heart per wrong guess.
The needs it meets
- ProgressCore
- Seeing yourself get better: a level cleared, a rank gained, a skill learnt.
- Entertainment
- Passing time and unwinding, carried off by stories, music and video.
Why it wins
- One line of rules: one cat per colored region, row and column, and no two cats touching, not even diagonally. The cats make an abstract grid look friendly.
- Three hearts per level make guessing expensive, so every solve feels earned rather than lucky.
- Daily puzzles and global leaderboards for the fastest time give a reason to return each day, and it plays offline.
- Its reach is bought: the studio runs a large stream of video ads, so a niche logic puzzle found a mass audience.
What keeps it ahead
- Paid growth
- Heavy ad spending to buy users, paid back by those who pay.
- Easy start
- Anyone can use it at once, with a reward within seconds.
- Daily habit
- A reason to come back every day: streaks, check ins, energy.
How it makes money
AdsSubscriptions
Free and paid for by ads between levels, with the minimum gap between ads shrinking over a player's first week; on iOS a Premium subscription is also sold.
What a small team can take from it
Queens comes from the old Star Battle puzzle, so the idea is free; the work is a generator of grids with one solution and no guessing. A small team can build that, even for the web, but not the ad budget.
This week
- World: top free games, number 3, in 9 of 10 countriesUS App Store 1 · UK App Store 1 · US Google Play 1 · UK Google Play 1 · Germany Google Play 1 · France Google Play 1
updated 29 October 2026
- Developer
- Oakever Games
- Category
- Game
- Stores
- App Store, Google Play
- First in a list
- 29 October 2026
Sources
- Meowdoku makes $200K a day, fully from ADS! (Gamigion) 20 July 2026
- Solving LinkedIn Queens with SMT (Hillel Wayne) 12 June 2025
This is our analysis and judgement, drafted by an AI agent from the store pages and public sources and read by a person before it went up. Every figure has a source; where there is none, we give no figure. Found a mistake? Write to [email protected].