What Noggin is
Noggin is a shelf of small daily puzzles. Every game on the shelf is set once a day,
the same for everybody, and each one is marked out of 100 — so the whole day adds
up to a single number you can compare with a friend. There is nothing to install, no
account is needed to play, and when you have finished the day’s puzzles there is
nothing else to do. That is the point.
The games
They are deliberately different from one another, because doing variations on the same
puzzle is not much of a day:
- Spectrum hides a scale.
Six things, put them in order — oldest to newest, lightest to heaviest, mildest
to hottest. It rewards knowing roughly how big or old or hot things are, and forgives
you for not knowing exactly.
- Rung is a word ladder. Climb
from one word to another changing a single letter at a time, every step a real word.
You can always get there; the question is how directly.
- Vault is a hidden code. Every
guess comes back with how many symbols are exactly right, how many belong within one
slot of where you put them, and how many sit further afield — never which.
Working that out is the game.
- Deduce is a logic grid. Four
people, three things to work out about each, and clues that rule things out rather
than handing you answers. Exactly one arrangement fits, and you never have to
guess.
How the day is scored
Every game uses the same 0–100 scale, because a day summed into one number only
means something if a 90 means roughly the same amount of “that went well”
whichever game it came from. A perfect round is 100, everything below it is
earned rather than granted, and an unfinished board still scores for the part you got
right. The day’s total is a sum and not an average, so a game left undone reads as
an incomplete day rather than being quietly divided away.
How scoring works sets out the numbers for each game.
Streaks, and keeping them
Your streak counts consecutive days on which you played anything at all — one
game is enough to keep it — and today not being finished yet never breaks it.
Scores are kept against your browser from the first puzzle you finish, with no sign-up.
Signing in is optional and exists for one reason: so a lost or replaced phone does not
take your streak with it. There is no password, just a link emailed to you.
