Most of our daily games stand on their own: one game, one round a day. The Daily is different. It is a set of three games, dealt fresh every day, that everyone plays in the same order for one combined score. You get one attempt at the whole set, and it has a leaderboard of its own.
Which games can be dealt
Not every game qualifies. To be dealt into The Daily, a game has to be one with leaderboards, play on both phones and computers, fit a phone held upright, and put a time limit on every run of the mode The Daily plays. That last rule is why an endless game, or one you could leave open forever, never shows up there. Games without leaderboards, like our crowd-vote game, are never dealt.
Long games are allowed. Since 6 November 2026 a day can include a game like Uncommet or GeoDrop that takes three or four minutes, and The Daily's card tells you roughly how long that day's set will take before you start.
How the three are chosen
Every day, our server takes all the games that qualify and shuffles them. The shuffle is driven by a secret only the server knows, together with the date, so the draw is not made by hand and nobody can work out a future day's set in advance. The first three games in that shuffled order that pass two more rules make the day's set:
- None of yesterday's games. Since 7 November 2026, no game is in The Daily two days in a row.
- A game's own spacing. Some games keep a gap between their appearances in The Daily, so their special Daily content is never stretched thin. GeoDrop, Mate in One, Purrglar and Pack It keep at least a week between their Dailies, and Uncommet 60 days.
A day's set is fixed the first time anyone opens that day's Daily, and it never changes after that. No page shows tomorrow's set before tomorrow.
Content of its own
When a daily game is dealt into The Daily, it does not reuse that game's own round for the day. If it did, anyone who had already played the game's own page would know The Daily's answers. So each daily game plays content of its own in The Daily, drawn from a seed made with the same server secret, so even the set's contents stay unknown until you start it:
- GeoDrop deals eight places of its own, never the day's eight, nor a place the game's own days deal within 60 days.
- How Many deals five scenes whose subjects the game's own day does not use within 21 days either way.
- Mate in One plays from a separate deck of puzzles that no day of the game ever deals.
- Daily IQ deals ten puzzles of its own, and gives you 25 seconds for each. On its own page there is no time limit at all.
Turning three scores into one
Three different games keep score in different ways: one counts correct answers, another kilometres, another points in the thousands. To add them up fairly, each game has a par curve, a short table we measure for each game by having a test player play it many times. The curve turns the game's own score into Daily points: an ordinary good run lands somewhere in the hundreds, the top of the curve is 1,000, and a score beyond it keeps earning a little more, closer and closer to 1,250 but never reaching it.
On The Daily's board, a higher total ranks first. Two equal totals are split by the time spent playing, less first, and then by who finished first.
When it opens and closes
A day's Daily opens at midnight New York time and can be started until 11:58 PM New York time. A set started just before the close still gets time to finish: its ticket runs a few minutes past midnight, a little longer on a day with a long game. The day's board becomes final from 00:15 the next morning.
Like every daily game, each day's Daily is played at one fixed version of each game. If we change a game's rules during the day, The Daily keeps the version it started with until the next day, so everyone on a day's board played by the same rules.