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.
Every game on the shelf is set every day, and each one is worth up to 100, so a day of the four games below is out of 400. They 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.
- Rung — 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.
- 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.
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 a small independent project, not a company. It is built and run by one person, and it is hosted, maintained and paid for the same way.
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 Rung
- How to play Deduce
- Privacy — what is collected and what is not