How to play
One page, four puzzles, one attempt each. Everything else is detail, and the detail is below.
The four slots
Three slots hold the same puzzles every day, in the same order: Number Chain, Flag Fragment and Pipe Connect. The fourth is the Wildcard, which holds one of twelve other puzzles for a week at a time before rotating. All fifteen are listed on the puzzles page.
Which four you get is decided by the calendar date and nothing else — not by a server, not by who you are, not by how you have been doing. Two people in different countries on the same local date get the identical page.
One attempt
Each puzzle can be played once per day. There is no retry, and closing the app mid-puzzle does not reset it — you come back to where you were. Giving up is allowed and is its own choice: revealing an answer ends the puzzle at zero stars rather than leaving it unfinished.
If you want to play a puzzle again for the practice, that is what practice mode is for, and it never touches the day's result.
Stars
Every puzzle is worth up to five stars, and the three fixed puzzles are what the day is scored out of — fifteen stars in a perfect day. Finishing is usually worth three; the last two come from doing it well, and what "well" means is different for each puzzle. Number Chain rewards an elegant route, Pipe Connect rewards fewer taps, Flag Fragment rewards guessing before the flag is uncovered.
The Wildcard is scored the same way and shows up in your grid, but it sits outside the day's fifteen, so a week of unfamiliar Wildcards cannot quietly wreck your record.
Streaks, and the day you are allowed to miss
Playing a day keeps your streak. Missing one ends it, with one exception: subscribers get a single missed day forgiven per calendar month, applied automatically the moment it is needed. You do not have to claim it and you cannot save it up.
A day where every fixed puzzle happens to be switched off — which happens if we have to pull a broken puzzle — is forgiven for everyone, because it was not your day to miss.
The grid you share
Finish the day and you get a small block of text: a line per puzzle, each with its emoji, its five stars filled in, and a short tail that hints at how you got there. It gives nothing away. Somebody who has not played yet can read your grid and still have the same day you had.
Boards
Each day has a board, and so do your current and best streaks. A board shows the distribution — how many people scored what — and where you sit in it. It does not show who anybody is, and there is no way to look a player up, because a daily leaderboard with names attached is a log of who played when.
Offline
The puzzles are generated on your device from the date, so a day can be played with no network at all. Results are held locally and sync when you are next online. Nothing waits for the network to let you start.