The game has two front doors. One is a fixed appointment with everybody else; the other is an open ladder you climb at your own pace. They reward completely different habits.
Daily dossiers
Three cases a day — twenty names, fifty and a hundred — identical for every player, in Dutch or in English, rolling over at midnight in Amsterdam. Finishing one keeps your streak alive, and your time can be compared against everyone else who played the same grid.
Because everyone has the same grid, the daily is the only place where a time means something socially. It is also the shortest commitment in the game: the easy dossier is twenty names and usually a couple of minutes.
Free play
Four tracks — easy, hard, extreme and marathon — each climbing sixteen rungs from ten names to two hundred and fifty. The track decides which kinds of clue you get, and the rung decides how many names they have to sort through.
- Easy asks only clues you can answer by looking. A large easy grid is a patience exercise, not a hard one.
- Hard mixes in the clues you have to count.
- Extreme lives on counting clues, which is why a small extreme grid can beat a large easy one.
- Marathon uses many gentle clues instead of a few sharp ones — see the marathon track.
A replayed rung is not a repeat
Free-play levels are dealt from a shuffled catalogue, so replaying a rung gives you different names, different clues and a different culprit. Nothing carries over except the size and the clue tiers. That makes the ladder a place to practise a specific kind of difficulty rather than a set of puzzles to memorise.
The one thing that never survives a reshuffle is a position clue, since it describes where a card sits rather than what it says.
Which one should you play?
Use the daily to measure yourself: same puzzle, everybody, once a day. Use free play to build a specific skill — pick the track that trains the clue type you are slowest at, and stay on a rung until it stops being uncomfortable.
If you are new, the easy track's lower rungs are the gentlest introduction in the game, and the walkthrough takes about a minute.
Why the one-a-day format took over
A single shared puzzle per day is now the dominant shape for word and logic games, and Wordle is the reason people noticed. The mechanics were not new; the scarcity was. One puzzle, the same one for everybody, and then nothing until tomorrow.
Scarcity does two things an infinite feed cannot. It makes finishing possible, which is where satisfaction comes from, and it makes results comparable — your time means something because it is the same case someone else played.
Free play exists for the other mood, when you want ten in a row and do not care about comparison. Which one to reach for, and why alternating beats bingeing, is in one puzzle a day beats a marathon.
Related reading
- Why the marathon track feels so different — Most difficulty comes from clues that are hard to apply. Marathon takes the opposite route: every clue is easy, there are simply a lot of them, and one slip costs the grid.
- Why exactly one name always survives — Every case is generated, never hand-written. The four tests a clue chain has to pass, why an unsound chain is thrown away rather than patched, and how to use the guarantee while you play.
- Speed comes from accuracy, not from hurrying — How the clock actually works, what the two help tools cost, and the habits that make a run fast: fewer passes over the grid, not faster ones.
- Why one puzzle a day beats a marathon — Spacing, streaks and the shared-puzzle effect: why ten minutes a day builds more skill and more enjoyment than a two-hour session once a fortnight.