A Puzzle Day celebration, with stories from LinkedIn Games players

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.

This past Wednesday was International Puzzle Day, a holiday dedicated to celebrating puzzle-solving of any type, including jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, sudoku and any other puzzle game you can think of. This year, we at LinkedIn joined the celebration with special posts and puzzles for the occasion (more on those later in this newsletter).?

In celebration of the day, I asked LinkedIn Games players if they could share any stories of LinkedIn Games helping them at work. I loved the stories I got, and wanted to share a few of my favorites.?

Pinpoint for language and creative thinking skills

I posted about this story earlier this week, but it’s one I really enjoy. Pritish G told me that as he consistently played Pinpoint daily, he found improvements in his thinking and vocabulary. Pritish says, “The game forced me to think critically, analyze letter patterns, and try different word combinations. Over time, I became faster at brainstorming ideas and finding the right words in conversations at work. For example, during a team brainstorming session, I found myself coming up with creative and precise words that perfectly captured our vision — something I used to struggle with.” Pritish adds that he continues to make Pinpoint a part of his routine, adding, “it’s like a mini workout for my brain!”

Building connections over Queens

Raghav Naganathan shared a story of a social benefit that can come from playing LinkedIn Games. Raghav, an account manager who frequently talks to clients, had an unexpected connection because of Queens. “One day,” Raghav told LinkedIn, “my client mentioned at the start of the call that he always has trouble with devising solutions for Queens, and was quite upset about it. I took it as an opportunity, considering that I had over a 250 streak on Queens, to give him some pointers from my experience.” Raghav reported that this connection was remembered in later meetings: “He was very thankful, and every time we have a meeting, he mentions how my strategies were able to help him with the game.” This encapsulates a big motivator for why we launched games at LinkedIn in the first place: games help spark conversations, and those conversations can lead to deeper connections.

A LinkedIn Games data bootcamp

Finally, Camdyn Anders shared a very creative use of LinkedIn Games to train even more skills, for her job as a data analyst. Camdyn mentioned that after working for years at a job that used the data visualization program Tableau, she recently started a new role at a company that used Domo, a different program that was unfamiliar. Camdyn used her LinkedIn Games statistics as part of a project to gain familiarity with Domo. Camdyn told Linkedin, “Every day I record my scores in a spreadsheet: tracking my times, the size of the puzzle, the time of day I completed it, et cetera. Since Domo was new to me, I used that data as my starting point, building dashboards to visualize metrics related to my scores. It was a fun way to learn a new software and also gave me an excuse to play more games.”

Camdyn used LinkedIn Games as the basis for a new way to incorporate play into business, in order to make learning new skills a fun process. Camdyn added, “Turning my LinkedIn games data into dashboards helped me understand Domo’s features and also gave me a hands-on project to apply what I was learning. It was a great way to blend work and play while developing my skills at the same time.”

Thanks to everyone who responded! It always means a lot to hear from people who play our games, and I’m glad it’s helping people in tangible ways. Happy Puzzle Day, and here’s to more play in the future!

?? Pinpoint: The Pinpoint puzzle for Puzzle Day celebrated puzzles in a straightforward way, with the category being types of puzzle (with clues “Rebus,” “Dropquote,” “Sudoku,” “Crossword,” “Jigsaw”). The first two types of puzzle are less well known, though there’s a chance you’ve seen a rebus without knowing what it’s called. A rebus is a puzzle that uses letters and pictures that, when said aloud, represent a word or phrase. For example, Merriam-Webster provides the following example of a rebus:

The rebus depicts a can, the letter U, the letter C, and a water well, so you can sound this out to get the phrase “Can you see well?”?

Meanwhile, a dropquote is a puzzle where a quote is written out into columns (wrapping around when needed), and the letters in each column appear above the column in a random order. So, the solver must “drop” the letters into the right places in order to reassemble the quote. For example, in the puzzle below, the “H” must go into the only white square in the first column, and the letter after “H” in the first word must be either an “A” or a “D,” since only those letters are above the second column.

This dropquote, by the way, solves to “HAPPY PUZZLE DAY FROM US AT LINKEDIN.”

I was interested to see a comment from someone who guessed “Indonesia” from the “Rebus” clue, pointing at the soup mee rebus. I learned something new!

Finally, a commenter pointed out something interesting, looking at Google search trends for the day:

If you note the exact times these spikes in interest occur, they start at 3:00 AM Eastern on January 29 (i.e. the time the puzzle-based Pinpoint was released), and taper off at 3:00 AM Eastern on January 30 (i.e. the time the next day’s Pinpoint was released). I wonder what could’ve caused a spike in Google interest for that specific period of time!

Play today’s Pinpoint?

?? Crossclimb: Meanwhile, the Crossclimb puzzle for Puzzle Day ended with two clues about a popular puzzle, asking for a term for the structure of a sudoku puzzle, and a verb meaning to put numbers in the empty cells of a sudoku (GRID/FILL).?

I’m not a very skilled sudoku solver myself, but I did get into sudoku for a few months after finding the YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic (who were kind enough to post a video on Queens the other day). “Grid” and “fill” are also crossword terms, but I wanted to use a word puzzle to reference a puzzle that’s about as far from a word puzzle as you can get.

Play today’s Crossclimb?

?? Queens: The Queens puzzle, titled “National PZZL Day,” featured four regions (green, orange, yellow and gray) shaped like the letters P, Z, Z and L. I’m really impressed by the construction of this puzzle, since the PZZL theming forces the shapes of five regions (four for the letters, and the 1x1 region inside the P). Considering there are eight regions in this puzzle, it’s very impressive to fit these five regions into an 8x8 grid in a way that makes for a uniquely solvable puzzle.

Play today’s Queens

?? Tango: The Tango puzzle commemorated Puzzle Day in two ways. The most obvious one is that the emojis have changed from a moon and a sun, into a puzzle piece and a lightbulb.

The more subtle one, hinted at in this puzzle’s title, “P for Puzzle,” is that the given “x” and “=” signs connect squares in the shape of a large P (for, as previously stated, “puzzle”). Interestingly, we’ve had P shapes in a past Tango puzzle, also named in reference to “P for Puzzle.” The grid below is from January 20, 2025:

Comparing these two “P” grids, it’s fascinating to see how puzzles inspired by similar concepts can end up so radically different.?

Play today’s Tango

Want to be notified when new editions are released? You can sign up for reminders for each of our games here.?

This week’s topic: A video on the MIT Mystery Hunt

Closing the thread on the Mystery Hunt: I posted a video of the experience a few days ago, if you’re interested in seeing the hunt from a first-person point of view!

If you want to see more about the Hunt, there’s a 51-minute documentary about the 2017 event available on YouTube, as well as a TED Talk about puzzle hunts (true to form, there’s a puzzle hidden in the TED talk, which you can see more about here).

Share your thoughts in the comments below??

Know someone who would enjoy Gametime? Share it with them directly or your network by clicking the “Share” button below!