Purrglar

Purrglar is a free daily heist puzzle you play in your browser: plan a cat burglar's route through tonight's building, step by step, then press GO and watch the heist play out. Every guard, camera and laser runs a fixed, numbered cycle, and every one of them is on step 1 when the cat goes, so a good plan can be counted out before it runs. It is a stealth puzzle game about timing rather than reflexes: there is nothing to dodge with your thumbs, only a route to get right. Every night is one run of two rounds, the same for everyone: round 1 is the Easy heist, with two minutes to plan, and round 2 the Hard heist, a bigger and better-guarded building with three minutes to plan.

A heist starts on the roof. Drag the route from the skylight, tile by tile, past the guards' torches, the cameras' sweeps, the lasers and the sleeping dog, through the display cases and out of a door. Walking onto a case steals it on the spot, with no time lost. The cat moves one tile a beat, two beats a second, and you can make it wait one beat on any step of the route by tapping that step; the pause shows the beats the cat waits there. While you plan, the traps loop through their cycles on the plan, with every step of every guard's patrol numbered, so you can see exactly where each one will be on beat 7 or beat 23. The plan clock never stops: when it runs out the cat goes with whatever route you have drawn (and the quickest way out added to it).

Then comes the watch. The cat follows your plan to the beat while a walking jazz bass keeps time. If nothing sees it, it slips out with everything it bagged: a clean getaway. If a trap spots it, the alarm sounds and it has six beats to reach a door or the skylight's rope before the shutters close: getting out is a noisy getaway that keeps half the haul, and getting caught keeps nothing. Each round scores up to 1,000 points: 700 for carrying out the whole purse, scaled by the share you got out, and up to 300 more for doing it in the fewest beats possible on a clean getaway. A round that ends in a capture scores −250. The night's score is the two rounds added up (never below zero), so a perfect night is 2,000. At the end Purrglar tells you the best possible number of beats for the night, but never the route that does it.

Every case is worth a round figure ($100,000, $150,000, $200,000 and up), and Hard nights carry bigger purses for bigger risks. The night has one daily leaderboard, where the quicker planner ranks higher on an equal score, and you get one attempt a day, so your first night is the one that counts, just like the other daily games. Purrglar is also one of the games The Daily can deal you, with a night of its own: the same two rounds, clocks and scoring, on two heists the game's own nights never deal. New heists arrive at midnight New York time, and no floor plan comes back for years. If you like counting moves before you make them, it sits well with our logic games and brain games, and with the rest of our puzzle games.

On a phone, drag the paw tab under the end of your route to draw it (the route draws just above your finger, so you can see where it goes), tap the route to add or take off a pause, and use UNDO, CLEAR and GO under the plan. On a computer, the plan fills the middle of the screen with the traps on duty on one side, the clock and buttons on the other and a beat timeline underneath that lines your route up against every trap's cycle; drag with the mouse, or use the arrow keys to step the route, W to pause, Backspace to undo and Enter to go. Purrglar plays free in any modern browser on mobile and PC, with nothing to download.