If you follow us on Facebook, you might have seen our New Year's Day post:

This was a silly way of writing the number 2016 using nothing other than the number two. I made no attempt to make it simple; as a matter of fact, I went out of my way to be absurd about it. But that got me wondering, "What is the shortest way to write 2016 using just twos?" 

Here's one possibility:

2^(22/2) - 2^(2*2 + 2/2)

Here's another:

2222 - 222 + 2^2^2

And maybe you can think of some better ones.

But this caused me to think, "Wouldn't it be interesting if we took the concept of the Operations Game and extended it to creating four-digit numbers, and allowing people to reuse digits."

So the game Express This! was created one week ago today, on New Year's Day. You can find it here: Express This! and here: Express This! Daily.

You will notice that this game has something a little different in the "Game Over" screen; you will see a "play this puzzle again" link, and a "play a different puzzle" link. The goal with this game is to get the lowest score possible, so even if you've solve a puzzle, you may not have found the best solution, so you might want to try the puzzle over again.

(Eventually, if there aren't any issues with this feature, we'll also add it to the Diamond Slide game; we've had requests from some players to add the "play this puzzle again" feature, and it makes a lot of sense to do that!)

The daily puzzle's best score is displayed on the game page, so you can check back throughout the day to see if anyone has beaten your score. You can try the daily repeatedly to get better and better scores. And if someone beats your high score, you have the option of trying again, in order to take the top spot back again. However, to take the top spot back, you must beat the best score, and not just tie it.

Each day you can check back to find out what the best solution for the previous day's puzzle was.

If you find any bugs in the game, please don't hesitate to drop us a message, either on the community forum, or on the "Ask Professor Puzzler" page.

Also, this morning we made a slight change which should affect the end-of-game experience for many of the games. Games which have a small playing board often have scrollbars in the end-of-game message window, because there isn't room for all the messages, achievement ribbons, scores, and play-buttons. With the new tweak, the game board will resize to make room for all of these things. Please let us know if you experience any issues with this feature.