Five Rungs

About Five Rungs

Five Rungs is a free online Puzzle game that runs right in your browser. There is nothing to download and no account to create: press Play and you are in. It works on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile.

Five daily puzzles on one page, and deliberately five different kinds rather than one kind five times over: a region-logic board, an arithmetic grid, a polyomino packing, a word ladder and a country hunt that answers in kilometres and compass points. The date is the only seed, so there is no server and everybody gets the same five — at midnight UTC, written on the page, because local midnight would mean two people on the same calendar day comparing different puzzles. Because the date is the seed an archive costs nothing, so every past day is still playable, which the commercial versions of this genre cannot do. Nothing here is hand-written per day and nothing is authored: each puzzle is generated and then handed to a solver before it is shown. Lanterns and Ledger must come out by deduction with no guessing; Tessera and Lanterns are counted exhaustively for a single answer; Rungs is a breadth-first count of shortest chains, so exactly one ladder of that length exists. Over 220 consecutive days every puzzle generated and every one was unique. Emoji result grids per puzzle and one combined block, showing the run and never the answer, and a streak that survives a private window by falling back to memory.

How to play

Press the Play button to load the game. Most games are played with the mouse or by tapping the screen; keyboard games use the arrow keys, WASD or the space bar. Read the in-game instructions for the exact controls, and use the fullscreen button for the best experience.

Frequently asked questions