News & Updates

New daily game! Hounds & Hydrants is our take on the tents and trees puzzle, with fire hydrants for the trees and dogs for the tents.

Give every hydrant its own dog, directly beside it. The dogs can't touch, not even at a corner, and the numbers around the grid tell you how many dogs go in each row and column. It starts as a quick 8x8 on Monday and grows into a hard 10x10 by Sunday.

Solve it and the pups go mark their territory. We'll let you see that part for yourself.

Have a go, or read the launch post for the controls and a solving tip.

Thanks for playing, and keep the feedback coming!

When we started Greatest Games, it was a free side project: a few daily puzzles we wanted to play ourselves. We've been blown away by the response. Thousands of you now play every day, you send us ideas and bug reports, and you've turned a handful of games into a whole lineup.

Growing comes with real costs like server costs and puzzle editing as we expand the lineup. We want Greatest Games to stay free, always. So here's how we're paying for it.

• Ads keep it free. The site is now ad-supported, with ads from our partner Raptive. Every daily puzzle stays free to play, for everyone.
• Greatest Games Plus, for anyone who'd rather go ad-free. Plus is an optional paid plan that removes the ads across the whole site. It also opens the full puzzle archive. Free accounts can play the last 7 days. You'll find it at /subscribe and under "Go ad free" in the menu.

All puzzlers still get every new puzzles, every day, for free. If you do join Plus, thank you. It helps us keep the lights on.

Thanks for playing, and for helping this thing grow.

Four things are new since the last note.

• Leaderboards refresh! The boards now rank points today, over the last 7 days, this month and all time. See how you rank today both overall, and for specific games from the game page.
• We launch a merch shop! shop.greatest.games is our new merch shop. We launch our first drop in September. Enjoy!
• Feature request board. Send an idea at feature requests. You can also vote and comment there. We email you when your request moves to In progress or Shipped. We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas!
• Umbra is live! Umbra is a daily logic puzzle. You divide the grid into fields of light and shadow. Each number gives the size of its field. Shrooms players will love Umbra!

Thank you for your support! We love hearing from you.

Up until now, missing a single day meant your streak was gone, no matter how long you'd been at it. That's no longer true.

How it works. Once your streak hits 5 days, a missed day gets frozen automatically — you don't have to do anything or bank a freeze ahead of time. Next time you visit the site you'll see a note about it, plus an email if you've got those turned on. Solve a puzzle the next day and your streak just keeps going. Miss a second day in a row, though, and it resets to zero like normal.

A freeze holds your place, it doesn't pad your count. So if you were at 12 and missed a day, you're still at 12 when you come back — it bridges the gap rather than adding to it. Solve that day's puzzle and you're at 13.

You get one every five days. We didn't want to make streaks unbreakable, just a little more forgiving. A streak that can never end isn't really a streak, so the freeze resets on its own five-day timer rather than stacking up.

Why we bothered with this. Most of the time, when someone's streak ends here, it's not because they stopped caring — it's a busy day, a trip, staying out too late, whatever. Losing 30 days of solving over one bad night always felt like a harsh trade. This felt like the smallest fix that wouldn't turn streaks into a number that doesn't mean anything.

A couple of smaller things came along with this. There are milestone badges now at 10, 25, 50, and 100 days — you can see them on your profile, and yes, nobody's hit 100 yet. We also cleaned up how streaks get counted: it used to be that finishing a puzzle kept your streak going whether you solved it or not, but the leaderboard only ever counted actual solves — so your streak number and your leaderboard number could quietly disagree. Now it's just solves, everywhere, consistently. If you'd already built up a streak under the old rule, don't worry, it's not getting knocked down.

This one came straight from what a bunch of you asked for, so — thank you, and keep telling us what's not working.

Two changes this week, and both of them came straight out of your feedback.

Shrooms. You've been loving the challenge, but Medium and Hard were proving genuinely tough — tough enough that a few of you assumed Medium wasn't solvable by deduction alone. (It is, we promise.) The ask was clear: harder puzzles should be worth more. So they are now — +25 points on Medium and +75 on Hard, spelled out in the scoring panel so you can see exactly where it came from. One caveat: solves you'd already banked keep their original totals, so your older Medium and Hard runs will read a little low next to new ones.

Droplet. The Tetris-meets-Scrabble mashup has fans, but building words was far too chaotic — and you were right about the vowels, especially the letter I. Quite a lot changed:

• The letter bag is retuned. Fewer vowels overall, a lot fewer I's, and considerably more S's. J, Q, X and Z are still in the bag — one of each — because rare as they are, they're the only tiles that can turn a bonus square into a headline score, and we didn't want to take that ceiling away.
• Wildcards you name yourself. There are still wildcard tiles — worth nothing on their own, but they'll finish any word of four letters or more. They used to fill themselves in automatically, often not with the word you'd have picked. Now the board pauses and you choose the letter from an A–Z list, so the best play on the board is the one that fires.
• Three-letter words wait for you. A short word used to clear the instant it formed, which often cashed in the cheapest thing on the board and demolished a longer word underneath. Now a three-letter word lights up and waits until you tap it to claim it; four letters and up still clear on their own.
• Vowel floods are capped. A run of four or more vowels used to turn up in 93% of blocks. It's now zero: three in a row is the hard ceiling.
• Long words finally pay. A six-letter word used to be worth barely more than a three-letter one. Length now multiplies your score, up to 8× at eight letters.
• A hold slot and a three-deep queue. Park an awkward tile for later (tap it, or press C), and see what's coming next.
• Everything falls slower, which is what makes all of the above actually usable.
• Bonus squares stay visible once a tile lands on top of them, and they're properly outlined in dark mode — previously they just disappeared.

Still on our list for Droplet: an extra column to give you more room to work with, and color-coding the letter types.

Thank you for the notes on both of these. This one was almost entirely reader-driven, so please keep them coming!

New daily game, and this one comes with a story attached: you're helping Odysseus get home to Ithaca. Flood the map one color at a time until there's a single unbroken stretch of sea between him and where he needs to be.

Two things make it different from other flood games you may have played:

• It's a path rule, not a fill rule. You're opening a route, not just painting the board.
• There's a hard cap on allowed moves, rather than a par move count to target. This means you can lose by running out of moves!

Have a go, and if you want the longer story of how it came together, we wrote it up on the blog.

Thanks as always for playing, and please keep the feedback coming — it really does help inform what we build next!

A few small feature updates, and we launched a leaderboard!

• Passwords, if you want one. Magic links still work exactly as before, but you can now set a password instead of digging through your inbox every time you log in.
• Leaderboards. Top twenty per board, plus your own best three days on each.
• A proper profile page. Your streak sits right at the top, alongside your current and longest runs and a day-by-day view of everything you've solved across every game. You can edit your display name, roll yourself a new avatar, and — if you ever want to — delete your account and everything attached to it, no email to us required.

Amsterdammed is a simple loop puzzle dressed up as the Amsterdam canals. You trace one continuous canal that runs through every open square and closes back on itself. One loop, no crossings, no loose ends.

IMO, it's the coziest game on the site right now, but it can get stressful later in the week as difficulty increases!

Take a lap, or read the launch note if you'd like the background on why we wanted a loop puzzle in the lineup.

Thank you all for the continued support. The notes you send us genuinely shape what gets made next, so please keep them coming. :)