The number desk
Daily number games
A new numbers puzzle every day, free and in your browser, nothing to install. No arithmetic — just grids, deduction, and the satisfying click of the last cell.
Sudoku
The classic number grid game.
Rotato
Spin the tiles to order the number grid.
About the number desk
The first thing to say about a daily number game is that it isn’t maths. Nobody here asks you to add, carry, or work out a percentage. The digits are simply the most compact set of symbols anyone has invented: nine of them, instantly distinguishable, no language required. Swap every 7 on a Sudoku grid for a purple triangle and the puzzle is identical. That is why these games travel so well, and why “I’m bad at maths” has never once stopped anyone from finishing one.
What you are actually doing is constraint solving. Every clue you are given removes possibilities from the cells around it, and the pleasure is in noticing which possibility has quietly become the only one left. It is the same move a detective makes, performed a few dozen times in a row, and it is why the last few cells of a hard grid fall so quickly once the middle finally cracks.
Sudoku is the desk’s anchor and the game that taught the world this genre. Ours prints four boards a day, Easy through Devilish, each with a single guaranteed solution, so the difficulty you pick is a real promise rather than a label. The clock runs while you play and pauses the moment you step away, which makes a personal best worth something. If you are new, start Easy: the point of the first few days is to learn where your eye goes, not to prove anything.
Rotato takes the same numbers somewhere stranger. Instead of filling a grid you rotate blocks of it, and every turn moves four numbers at once, so the puzzle is less about which digit goes where than about the order you touch things in. It is scored on moves rather than time, which rewards sitting still and thinking a beat longer, and it is the closest thing the desk has to a physical toy. Three difficulties print daily.
Both games are pure deduction, which means neither ever requires a guess. If you find yourself picking at random, the information you need is somewhere else on the board. Numbers not your thing today? The daily logic puzzles next door run the same deduction without a single digit, and the daily word games are two desks over.
