Daily logic puzzles

A logic puzzle makes you one promise: everything you need is already on the board. No vocabulary, no trivia, no lucky guesses, just a handful of rules and a grid that gives way to patient deduction. The daily format turns that promise into a habit. One edition prints at midnight US Eastern, the same for everyone, so your morning solve is finite, fair, and worth comparing. Think of it as a crossword ritual for people who’d rather work with numbers and rules than words.

The logic desk currently runs five games, and each pulls a different muscle. Sudoku is the canon: fill the nine-by-nine so every row, column, and box holds one through nine. Four difficulties print daily, Easy through Very Hard, each its own puzzle and each timed on its own. It rewards the methodical solver who enjoys chipping away at candidates, and if you’re just starting out there’s a primer on our free online Sudoku page.

Shrooms is our take on the star-battle: grow exactly two mushrooms in every row, column, and color region of the forest, and no two can touch, not even diagonally. It plays spikier than Sudoku. The regions twist the usual line-by-line logic into something more spatial, and the three board sizes (eight, ten, or twelve) scale from a quick forage to a real expedition. Rotato trades the clock for a move count: rotate blocks of four tiles to put the grid back in order, in as few turns as you can manage against par. It’s the one for players who like planning several moves ahead, closer to a solitaire chess study than a fill-in.

Nonogram is the picture-logic puzzle also known as Picross: the numbers on each row and column give the lengths of the filled runs, and solving every clue paints a hidden picture in the grid. The week ramps from a 5x5 warm-up to a 15x15 portrait, it is timed with bonuses for a fast, flawless, hint-free solve, and there is a full primer on our free online Nonograms page.

Amsterdammed is our daily simple loop puzzle, a Simple Loop in the tradition of games like Slitherlink, dressed as the canals of Amsterdam. You draw one continuous canal that flows through every open square exactly once and closes back on itself, curving around the houses, windmills, and tulip fields and never crossing a wall or touching itself. There are no number clues, just a single closed loop and pure deduction, and the board grows a little larger every day of the week, from a tiny Monday warm-up to a big weekend finale. It is timed, with the clock pausing the moment you step away.

New to the desk? Start with an Easy Sudoku to learn the house controls, move up to Shrooms once rows and columns stop scaring you, and save Rotato for the days you want to think slowly. When words are calling instead, the daily word games are one desk over.