daily fiction games
Seven daily logic and placement puzzles for when the dominoes run out, checked July 2026.
Pips, launched by the New York Times in August 2025, is a domino placement puzzle: fit a set of dominoes onto a board so that every coloured region satisfies its rule, a sum, an equals, a greater-than. It ships three boards a day, easy to hard, and full access sits inside the NYT Games subscription. If you have finished all three, or hit the paywall, the games below scratch the same pure-logic itch, every one loaded and verified this month.
For the whole daily-games field beyond logic, the map is at games like Wordle.
The closest cousins keep the tiles and drop the subscription.
Fill the board so the dots add up: dominoes placed to satisfy row and column totals, in daily 6x6, 7x7 and 8x8 sizes. Made by one developer at isotropic and running since early 2024, it is a pattern game rather than a guessing game, and fast solvers finish boards in seconds. A cheap Steam version exists for people who cannot stop.
Several independent sites rebuild Pips’ exact mechanic with no daily cap and no subscription; pipsgame.io is one of a cluster. They disclose that they are not the Times, and the puzzle polish is a step below the original, which is the price of unlimited boards.
Four of LinkedIn’s eight daily games are pure constraint puzzles in the Pips mould, free with an account, resetting at midnight Pacific, with leaderboards drawn from your connections.
Place one crown in every row, every column and every coloured region, with no two crowns touching. The star-battle formula compressed into a few minutes, and the one that made LinkedIn games a phenomenon.
Fill the grid with suns and moons so each row and column carries an equal count, never three of a kind in a row, honouring the equals and opposite signs between cells. A binary puzzle with the difficulty tuned for a coffee break.
Draw one continuous path through every cell of the grid, hitting the numbered waypoints in order. The rules fit in a sentence and the late-week boards still manage to bite.
Sudoku shrunk to a six-by-six board so a full solve fits inside a break. Same logic, same satisfaction, a third of the sitting time.
The same logic muscles, dressed as a crime scene.
A daily murder mystery run as a deduction grid: suspects, weapons and locations cross-referenced against a handful of clues until exactly one story survives. By the mystery writer G. T. Karber, ramping through the week to a hard Saturday, with a bestselling book series grown out of the web game.
Every game above was checked by hand in July 2026 and linked at its verified home; the one unofficial entry is labelled as exactly that. Descriptions describe; nothing here is ranked.