Daily Warmups

Under the hood

Each day's warmups come from four buckets — a featured heavy hitter (Corner Round or Crack'd Mirror, alternating), a home stretch slot (Crossed Corners, Four-Patch, Hourglass, rotating), a classic (Four-in-a-Row, Dots and Boxes, or Nim), and a wildcard pulled from whatever else is eligible and not already selected. While easy warmups may aim to reinforce basic play, the medium and above warmups are non-trivial by construction: a candidate position only qualifies if no line or group already has an obvious near-complete threat before the puzzle's move, and if it makes the mover a genuine two-or-more-way fork, not just a good single move dressed up as a puzzle.

Puzzles don't tell you up front whether the best you can do is a win or a draw — that's on purpose. The board is graded against the solver's actual best move regardless of what it achieves, and the reveal states the position's true character afterward. It's the same reasoning as an "already lost" label being wrong for a position whose real best outcome was holding a draw: labeling the objective first would just tell you what to look for before you'd looked.

An effort was made to provide a mix of difficulty levels during the warmups. As mentioned, each warmup carries an internal Easy/Medium/Hard rating, mostly built from how many legal moves were on the board at the decision point (more choices to sift through, ranked against that same game's own puzzles, not across games). In games such as Hourglass the rating is admittedly relative to other small board positions that are possible. Think of hard in Hourglass as meaning you are setting something up. Distance to the forced win, as tracked by the solver, is what a Hourglass puzzle's real difficulty comes from, as are Four-Patch and Four-in-a-Row. Corner Round and Crossed Corners were checked against the same criteria and remain as originally rated.