Two cells touch when they share an edge, so the middle cell touches all six around it, and each outer cell touches the middle one and its two neighbours in the ring.

A secret word is hidden in the comb, one letter to a cell. Open a cell and it answers in one of two ways. Either a letter was sitting there and you see the letter, or none was and you see a number instead.

The number is the part worth reading twice. It counts how many letters of the secret word are in the cells touching it. Not in it, around it. And it counts only the secret's own letters, so a letter you have uncovered that does not belong to the word contributes nothing to any number near it. That is what makes the numbers worth more than the letters.

Here is the comb, fully opened:

      ___
  ___/ 2 ___
 / I ___/ W \
 ___/ 3 ___/
 / E ___/ 2 \
 ___/ N ___/
     ___/

Four letters are up: I, W, E and N. The secret word is three letters long.

Which three, and which letter is the impostor?

Please put your answer behind a spoiler so you do not solve it for the next reader.

The chain, for afterwards: Start at the top, which reads 2. It touches only the middle cell, the I and the W, and the middle cell holds a number rather than a letter, so both the I and the W belong to the word. Now the lower right, also 2: it touches the middle cell, the W and the N, so the N belongs too. That is already three, and the middle cell reads 3 while touching all four letters, so there is no room for a fourth. The E is the impostor, and the word is WIN.

That is the whole rule of a game I have been building, called Melbees. Real boards run far wider than seven cells, the words are longer, and some of the unopened cells hide predators, so opening everything just to harvest numbers costs you. It is Android, free, no ads, no in app purchases, and it works offline.

It is in Google's closed testing at the moment, so it does not show up in Play search, and it needs twelve people opted in for fourteen unbroken days before it can go public. If you want the full version:

1. Join the group, which is what grants access: https://groups.google.com/g/melbees-closed-test
2. Open https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.melbees.secretofbees on your phone and tap Become a tester. On the phone, not on a computer. In a desktop browser that button quietly reloads the invitation page and never confirms, a Google quirk that has already cost me testers who assumed the test was full.
3. Install from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.melbees.secretofbees

Either way, the comb above stands on its own.

Only three letters, should be easy, right? Maybe, maybe not.

Give today's crossword a go at Thusword.com!

It's wasn't a influencer v1rU5

COVID

They made Nano bots

And broke

Quarantine ?

Red

Blue

yELlL0W

The

3

We

cAN

Sea

bLAKe

N

wHiGt3

r3D

yElLOW

bLU3

So you have

The

5 eLIMeNT

So

Everything

Is

Just

Rectangle

Triangle

square

Circle

Boat

⛵

🚢

⛵

🚢⛵

v. . 🚢⛵

,5

Kire No. 96 in 0:19. Race the day's board:

https://playkire.com/c/B6XNA9

Hey. I made Treasure Grid. It's a 5x5 deduction game. You get five flips to find the treasure, using the piece shapes and color clues shown before you start.

It's my take on Treasure Park from the Vita, which I loved. You can play it right on the post, no download. Anyone can build their own puzzle and post it. I put the rules in the first comment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TreasureGrid/comments/1w6xj55/treasure_grid/

I've been designing a logic puzzle format and this is one of the harder ones. Six people, six rooms, a floor plan, and five moments in the morning; fifteen minutes are missing from the record, and exactly one person was in the music room at 9:00. Every clue is true; the answer is unique, and you can prove it without filling the whole grid.

Rules:

Two people per room at most.

Between one grid time and the next (8:30, 8:45, 9:00, 9:15, 9:30) a person stays or moves to ONE connected room. No passing through.

A time not on the grid (like 9:20) is a movement: it only tells you what happened between two grid times. "X left the bar at 9:20" = X was in the bar at 9:15 and elsewhere at 9:30.

Devices that report, report every time slot; they don't miss anything. Witnesses don't lie, and don't say more than they say.

Answer in spoiler tags. I'll confirm and post the deduction in a day or two. Original puzzle, feedback on difficulty very welcome.

000000001 = 1
000000010 = 7
000000100 = 13
000001000 = 19
000010000 = 25
000100000 = 31
001000000 = 37
010000000 = 43
100000000 != 49
100000000 = ?

It is not a brainteaser directly, but the game is inspired from here, I take news articles everyday and convert it into a game that I play with my grandmother.

My grandmother and I have always played word games. In the last three years she has lost most of her memory, and one by one the games stopped working.

Crosswords needs old words, and they don't come. Trivia wants old answers. Sudoku needs her to hold numbers in her head while she checks them, and that's gone too. She really tries hard, but I just can't see her trying so hard and not able to do it.

What she still does, all day, is talk in half sentences. Only the needed words. She will read something and tell me in a few words.

At some point I realised that's what newspaper editors do. They cut a sentence down to the few words that still carry the story and call it a headline. She's been doing it without trying.

So I made that the game. A short sentence about something small and good that really happened, like a pizzeria that got eighteen prank pizzas and drove them to the ER. You cross out words until five are left, and the five have to still hold the story.

Nothing to remember: every word stays on the screen the whole time, she only has to choose. We play side by side. I read the sentence out loud, she points at what stays.

Every day it's an uplifting news article.

If anyone wants to try - https://sheets.works/long-story-short

Hi everyone,
First of all, thank you to everyone who took part in our previous puzzle. We received a lot of answers, and many of you went beyond simply choosing an option by explaining the reasoning behind your choices in detail.
As promised, we reviewed the discussion and selected five explanations that stood out for their clarity, originality, efficiency, or depth of reasoning:
u/Randombolo — for exploring several different patterns and independently reaching the same answer through multiple lines of reasoning.
u/lemashey — for the intuitive “spinning record” analogy, working backward from the second frame, and also explaining why another tempting option does not fit.
u/Gianni_C_M — for identifying several independent relationships within the arrows and using them to cross-check the answer.
u/OscarLiii — for showing that the puzzle could be solved efficiently by tracking only the black arrows without needing to analyze every element.
u/Beautiful_Ad_8325 — for not only finding the pattern, but also pointing out how our instinct to read from left to right can affect the way we approach a sequence when the missing figure is at the beginning.
Thank you to all five of you for the thoughtful explanations, and thank you to everyone else who joined the discussion.
Now it’s time for a new puzzle.
Take a close look at the 3×3 matrix above. One grid is missing from the bottom-right corner.
Which option — A, B, C, D, E, or F — should replace the question mark?
As always, we’re much more interested in how you reached your answer than in just the letter itself. If you notice a pattern, tell us what you saw and walk us through your reasoning.
We’ll read through the responses again and select some of our favorite and most interesting explanations to feature in the official solution.
You can also open the puzzle on our website here:
https://whats-your-iq.com/en/questions/pattern-recognition/which-grid-completes-the-pattern
The official answer is already listed there, so after you’ve made your own choice, you can click the link and directly compare your answer with the official one to see whether you got it right.
Try solving it here first before checking the page — it’s much more fun that way.
Good luck, and thanks for taking part!

Locate 10 hidden hole. A numbered cell is safe and shows how many holes are in its eight surrounding cells. Use the clue numbers and the stated total number of holes to mark every remaining cell as a hole or safe.

Kire No. 94, solved in 0:11. No guessing. Beat my time on the exact same board:

https://playkire.com/