New share messages, an eerie VMAs coincidence, and LinkedIn’s Study Break Contest

Welcome to Gametime, a weekly newsletter recapping the past week of games on LinkedIn, what’s new in the puzzles space, and more — brought to you by LinkedIn Games Editor Paolo Pasco. Click 'Subscribe' to join the community and be notified of future editions.

If you’ve been playing our games recently, and sharing your results with others, you may have noticed that the text you’re sharing for each puzzle has changed. We’ve tweaked the share objects for each game to be a little more informative and reflect how everyone solves these puzzles differently. Here’s a rundown of the new share messages.

For Pinpoint, messages now look something like this:

Pinpoint #X | 4 guesses

1?? | 4%

2?? | 64%

3?? | 97%?

4?? | 100% ??

The percentages reflect how “close” your guess is to the intended answer. If the category for a given day is “trees,” for example, guessing something like “flowers” would have a higher closeness percentage than something like “saxophone.” If you’ve ever thought “Man, I was so close with my first guess,” here’s a way to prove it!

Here’s what an example message for Crossclimb looks like:

Crossclimb #135 | 0:47 and flawless

Fill order: 1?? 2?? 4?? 5?? 3?? ?? ?? ??

There are two parts here: “and flawless” applies if you solve without requiring hints. “Fill order” shows the order in which you correctly answered the rungs (numbered from top to bottom in the starting position; if you filled in all the rungs correctly, in order from top to bottom, you’d see 1?? 2?? 3?? 4?? 5??). The ??and ??emoji represent the order in which you solved the top and bottom rungs. This way, you can see which clues your friends got first; were they solving on your wavelength, or did they ace that movie clue that stumped you?

Finally, here’s what an example message for Queens looks like:

Queens #135 | 0:41 and flawless

First ??s: ?? ?? ??

This one explains itself; “and flawless” again applies if you don’t use hints or other assistance, and the color blocks correspond to where you placed your first correct Queens. This way, you can see how people broke into the puzzle. This is one I’m particularly excited about. I’ve seen that there are a few different camps to solving Queens puzzles (“reason out each step” vs. “guess and adjust” are the two major schools of thought I’ve noticed), so I wonder if we’ll see a prevailing color pattern in the comments of the daily Queens posts, roughly following the intended logical path. Of course, there are puzzles where there are multiple valid logical techniques that can be used to get started, so I anticipate a good amount of variation.

All this is to say, we all solve puzzles in different ways — and now, we have a way to spotlight that fact.

?? Pinpoint: The Monday, September 9 extracurricular activities puzzle had a very low solve rate (53.9%), but paradoxically, the average number of clues needed was right down the middle (2.7). There was a lot of debate, as usual, about whether the clues were American-centric, although the clues went through the same review process through a group of international editors, and we took care to choose activities with solid international reach. Even so, there are ways to the right answer that don’t require direct experience with the activities — “School newspaper” as the last clue was intended to be a giveaway that the activities are all, well, school related. From there, it’s reasonable to consider how the others might also be school-related, and land at a reasonable guess of “school clubs.”

Right afterwards, we saw what may be the highest Pinpoint solve rate so far, at 98.7% for the Tuesday, September 10 Internet browsers puzzle (with clues “Opera,” “Edge,” “Safari,” “Chrome,” “Firefox”). The number of guesses was also very low (1.9), indicating that most people only needed one or two clues. I wanted to highlight one creative guess: presumably based on the first two clues, a few solvers put “The Barber of Seville,” an opera about someone whose job involves working with a sharp edge. Very clever thinking!

Play today’s Pinpoint?

?? Crossclimb:?

The Wednesday, September 11 puzzle ending with the two-word name for a movie monster who climbed the Empire State Building was the easiest of the week, with an average solve time of just 1 minute 48 seconds, and a solve rate of 94.1%. Not a lot to report for that puzzle, except that the clue for SONG, [Chappell Roan's "HOT TO GO!" or Katy Perry's "Hot and Cold," e.g.], happened to fall on the day of the MTV Video Music Awards, where Chappell Roan won Best New Artist, and Katy Perry won the Lifetime Achievement Award! I wrote this puzzle weeks in advance, but I will gladly take this as evidence of some clairvoyance on my part (and, if anyone from Chappell or Katy’s team sees this, you’re welcome).?

The Friday, September 13 puzzle was unconventional, ending with a word meaning "identical," and... that word again (SAME/SAME). Comments I enjoyed included:

• “Arghhhh I would have broken my record of 32 seconds...but I did a double take (no pun intended) on the bottom word.”
• “Would've been even faster if not for Same, Same. I just couldn't comprehend that it is the same word twice, despite the clue literally telling me that ??”
• “will_arnett_ben_stiller_same.gif”

I hope the curveball didn’t throw people too badly!?

Play today’s Crossclimb?

?? Queens: Surprising no one, the 11x11 puzzle played the hardest of the week, with an average solve time of 6 minutes and 8 seconds, and a solve rate of 84.7%. That puzzle, called “DOG” for reasons you can probably see, is below:

I managed to pull out a 0:48 time, thanks to a single-cell region in the center giving an easy place to start, and the yellow and red regions being pretty straightforward to resolve afterwards. In particular, the yellow region is now fully contained within one row, so we can X out all other cells in that row. That places an X in one of the two remaining red cells, leaving only one place for a Queen in the red region.

In my re-solve, I stalled at this point, trying to remember what step I took next. Can you spot the next thing to do?

It’s really simple: the fourth column only has one available spot, so a Queen has to go at the bottom of that column. It just goes to show that no matter how many strategies you pick up, you can’t forget the fundamentals. My hypothesis is that having a large grid makes it harder to scan for openings like that — that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking with it.

Play today’s Queens

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This week’s topic: LinkedIn’s Study Break Contest, for college students

If you’re a college student in the US, UK, CAN, AUS, and NZ and you play our games, you have an opportunity to pick up some nice prizes. See the post here for more details:

What’s your preferred way to relax on a study break?

Share your thoughts in the comments below??

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