About Noggin

Four small puzzles a day. Finish them over a coffee, get one score, and come back tomorrow.

What it is

Noggin is a shelf of short daily puzzles. Every day the same games are set for everybody, you play them once, and the whole day adds up to a single number you can compare with a friend.

Four games are set every day, and each one is worth up to 100, so the day is out of 400. The rest of the shelf is on More brain teasers, scored the same way but outside the day's total. The four are deliberately different from each other, because variations on one puzzle is not much of a day:

• Spectrum — six things and one hidden scale. Put them in order. It rewards knowing roughly how big, old or hot things are, and forgives you for not knowing exactly.
• Eyeball — five things to judge by eye: how many dots, what angle, what share of a shape, where a circle's center is. One guess each, then the truth drawn over it. No facts to know, only how well you see.
• Deduce — a logic grid. Four people, three things to work out about each, and a set of clues that rule things out rather than telling you answers. There is exactly one arrangement that fits and you never have to guess to find it.
• Vault — a hidden code and nine guesses. 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. It never tells you which, and that is the game.

Beside the four sits a second shelf, More brain teasers: games that are set every day and scored out of 100 like the others, but never count toward the day's total. Among them are a daily Sudoku that never needs a guess, a five-by-five crossword and Crumble, a themed word search where the letters fall.

The ideas behind it

One a day, and no more

Each puzzle is set once a day and is the same for everyone. That is the whole appeal of a daily: it ends. There is no feed, no next level, and nothing that rewards playing for two hours instead of five minutes.

You should never be stuck for the wrong reason

Everything you need to solve a puzzle is on the screen. Deduce is proved solvable by crossing off alone — the generator verifies that no guessing is required before a grid ever ships. Rung's ladders are checked against the real dictionary graph, so a climb always exists. Spectrum reveals the actual numbers at the end, so a puzzle you got wrong still tells you something.

Getting it wrong is still worth something

Running out of checks does not mean zero. A Spectrum board scores for the tiles you locked in, and a Deduce grid scores for the cells you had right. A near miss and a blank board should not look the same, because they are not the same. How scoring works spells the whole thing out.

An account is optional

You can play every day forever without giving us anything. Your scores are kept against your browser automatically. Signing in with an email address exists for exactly one reason — so that a new phone does not mean starting again — and there is no password to forget, only a link we email you.

Who makes it

Noggin is made by Graevyn Games LLC, a one-person independent game studio in Utah. One person builds it, runs it and pays for it, and Noggin is the studio's first game.

If something is broken, a puzzle seems wrong, or a word should have been accepted, there is a Send feedback item in the menu on every screen. It comes straight to us and it is read.

Elsewhere on the site

• How scoring works — the daily line-up, the 0–100 scale and how streaks are counted
• How to play Spectrum
• How to play Eyeball
• How to play Deduce
• How to play Vault
• Privacy — what is collected and what is not