Leaderboard

The best runs of the day and of the week, at each difficulty. No account needed — finish a puzzle, type a nickname, and you are on the board. Entries rank by score, and a faster time breaks a tie.

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How the ranking works

Your score is 10 points per square you filled in yourself, plus a flat bonus for finishing at that level, plus a speed bonus for every second you come in under par — minus 50 per mistake and 75 per hint. Entries rank by score, and if two scores tie, the faster time wins.

What each level is worth

Harder levels leave more squares to fill, pay a bigger finishing bonus, and pay more for every second saved. That is what stops a fast easy win outranking a hard-won expert one.

Par is the time to beat, not a time limit. Finishing slower than par simply earns no speed bonus; it never subtracts anything. Nothing is lost by taking your time, which is why a careful solve usually outscores a rushed one.

A worked example

A medium grid starts with 34 clues, so there are 47 squares for you to fill. Suppose you finish it in 9:00 with one mistake and no hints:

• 47 squares × 10 = 470
• Finishing bonus for medium: +250
• Speed bonus — 12:00 par minus 9:00, at 1.5 a second: +270
• One mistake: −50
• Total: 940

Notice the shape of it: the speed bonus and the mistake penalty are the two numbers you control. Had you taken the same time but used one hint instead of making one mistake, you would have scored 25 fewer — a hint costs more than an error, because it fills a square you would otherwise have had to earn.

Getting onto the board

There is no account, no email and no password anywhere in this. Finish any puzzle, type a nickname into the box on the win screen, and submit. That is the whole process, and the nickname is the only thing stored alongside your score, time, mistakes and hint count.

You can post from any level and from either the casual board or the daily puzzle. The daily is the more meaningful comparison, because everyone that day is solving the identical grid — on a casual board, no two players have seen the same puzzle.

Why scores are recalculated

The number your browser shows is not the number that gets stored. The server takes the raw details of the run — the level, the clue count, the elapsed seconds, the mistakes and the hints — and recomputes the score from them using the same table above. A browser claiming an impossible score does not get one.

When the boards reset

The daily board covers one UTC calendar day; the weekly board runs Monday to Sunday, also UTC. Using UTC for both means everyone competes on the same board whatever their timezone, rather than a player in Auckland and one in Los Angeles landing on different days for the same solve. Entries are removed automatically a few days after their board closes.

Want a better placing? The techniques guide is where the time savings actually come from — the speed bonus rewards clean scanning far more than fast clicking, and the single biggest time sink at every level is scanning for a square you have already ruled out. If you are new, start with the rules.