Puzzles of the year

🧪 Water sort | 🎬 Emoji films | 🎼 NeedleDrop

Ten of the best puzzles we featured in 2024

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Water Sort
Separate coloured liquids into beakers until they contain just one colour each. You can only pour liquids of the same hue on top of each other; more beakers and colours are added as you progress through the levels.
Click here to play

M🙂jie
Identify film titles from emojis. Every day, the website has three of these brainteasers, all linked by a loose theme: for the question above the theme is “NATO ABCs”. You have four guesses, and if you need clues you can be given the genre, director, main star and year of release.
Click here to play

Travle
Navigate from one country to another by naming the nations in between. Keen cartophiles can also try their luck at more local options, including UK counties, US states and – for the real pros – Swiss cantons.
Click here to play

Alphaguess
Find the “word of the day” by narrowing down its alphabetical position. Enter any word to reveal whether it comes before or after that day’s answer alphabetically. You then try another word, and so on and so on until you find it.
Click here to play

Grapple Grip
Escape increasingly complex traps using only a grappling hook. Challenges in later levels include surfaces your hook won’t stick to, doors you can only unlock from an inconveniently located button, and sections of the ceiling that fall away after being hooked once.
Click here to play

Unzoomed
Identify a city from satellite images. With each incorrect guess, you are told how far away you were and the picture zooms out to reveal a little more of the city. You get six tries.
Click here to play

MovieGrid
Guess the films that match two sets of criteria. You start with a blank grid of nine squares. Each row and column denotes either an actor, a director, or a type of film – genre, number of words in the title and so on. The aim is to fill in each square so that it matches both criteria.
Click here to play

NeedleDrop
Guess the movie from the song. You get four tries and a clue after each incorrect effort.
Click here to play

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One Button Four Lights
Use the button to turn on four lights. The button’s function changes with each level. If there are further instructions, we wouldn’t know – the whole website is in Japanese.
Click here to play

Squareword
Effectively a two-dimensional Wordle. Both the rows and the columns in the grid make up five-letter words. Players guess the horizontal words, with correctly positioned letters turning green and incorrectly positioned letters appearing in a yellow box at the end of the row. (As with Wordle, letters that don’t appear anywhere on the grid turn grey.)
Click here to play

Puzzle

Here is a simple puzzle “almost everyone gets wrong”, says Alex Bellos in The Guardian. There are two ducks in front of two ducks, two ducks behind two ducks and two ducks in between. What is the minimum number of ducks? Click here for the answer.

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