pips&pegs

Daily

One puzzle a day. The same one everybody else is looking at. A new one at midnight, and a streak you can lose.

The Daily DealOne solitaire shuffle. Everybody gets the identical cards. CryptogramCrack today's cipher. Every letter swapped for another.

Why one a day?

Because unlimited puzzles aren't a habit, they're a binge — and you'll be sick of them by Thursday.

A single puzzle, shared by everyone, arriving at a fixed time, is a small daily appointment. It's the whole reason a five-letter word game took over the world in 2022, and it had almost nothing to do with the word game. The streak is the mechanism: it costs nothing to start and it hurts to lose, which is a remarkably efficient piece of psychology.

Here the puzzle is generated from the date itself, using a deterministic shuffle. There's no server dealing them out, which means everybody gets the same cipher because everybody's calendar agrees — and it means the page still works with the internet off. Your streak lives on your own device. No account, and nobody at this end knows whether you kept it.

Coming