Daily whodunit

How to play the Daily Suspect

Something small has gone missing: a prize ribbon, a sourdough starter, the hotel's spare brass key. The Daily Suspect pins four suspects, four places and four items to a lit cork board, and five or six typed clues tell you who was where with what. Each suspect was in one place with one item, and nobody shares. Work out the lot, then accuse: who, where they were and what they had.

• Tap a box once to cross it off with a red pencil. Tap it twice to push in a brass pin. A third tap pulls the pin out.
• Turn on Auto-cross and the board pencils in the obvious crosses for you.
• Accusations are unlimited. Each wrong one adds a cross to your share card, which is information, not a cost.

Tips for deduction puzzles

• Begin with the clue that pins something down ("was in the kitchen"). Fixed facts anchor everything else.
• A "neither" clue knocks out two boxes at once. An "either" clue is worth waiting on until you have crossed off one side.
• When places are in a row, write the order before anything else. Words like "before", "after" and "directly before" are only useful once you can see the line.
• Cross off aggressively and pin only when you are certain. A board of crosses with one gap left is a solved puzzle.
• If two suspects are stuck on the same box, one of them must be wrong. Follow that thread.
• Each case also has a tell, a small detail in the story that points at one culprit. Read the story, not just the clue sheet.

A worked example. Clue one says the person in the cellar had the lantern. Clue two says Mick was not in the cellar. Now you also know Mick did not have the lantern, because whoever held the lantern was in the cellar. One thought, two boxes crossed. That is how a board collapses: not in a flash, but a clue at a time.

Hints and Not today

Three hints are written for every case, free, one at a time: where to start, what follows, and nearly everything. After the third the Locksmith will fill the board in for you if you ask. The day then ends as Not today and still counts toward your streak.

What makes our daily whodunit different

Every case is solved by logic and by nothing else, and we prove it. A checker tries all 576 ways of matching suspects to places and items, and a case only goes live if exactly one of them fits every clue and no clue is spare. The cast is a recurring crew of 24 painted townspeople, each with one name and one portrait, so you start to know them across cases: the same Beryl can be the scone judge one week and the school play's director the next. It is family-safe, runs in your browser and works with a keyboard and a screen reader.

A new case at your midnight

Each player gets the case for their own local date. Your streak counts every case you finish, and one spare key covers a single missed day. The share card shows how many accusations it took and never names the culprit.