One date, one grid, wherever you are
There is no vault of scheduled puzzles behind this page and no server deciding what you get. The date itself is the recipe: today's grid is built on your device by feeding the calendar date into the same generator that powers every board on this site, and because that construction is deterministic, anyone who asks for the same date receives exactly the same puzzle. Your copy of today's daily is also your neighbour's, and also the copy belonging to a stranger twelve time zones away once their calendar agrees with yours. The handover happens at your own midnight, since your device's date is the one that counts.
That construction has a pleasant consequence: the past never expires. The calendar above reaches back to the first daily ever posted, and clicking any earlier day simply rebuilds that day's grid from its date, identical to the one everyone solved at the time. Nothing is archived, because nothing needs to be.
A week with a shape to it
Two dials turn as the week goes round. The first is difficulty, which follows the weekday: Monday is the soft landing, Tuesday and Wednesday ask a little more, Thursday and Friday expect written candidates, and the weekend is set to Expert on the reasoning that a Saturday morning can absorb what a Tuesday lunch break cannot. The second dial is the board itself. Half of all days land on the classic nine-by-nine; the other half is split evenly between killer, X, jigsaw and the 6×6 mini, so each of those turns up roughly one day in eight. Which one a date holds is fixed by the date, not drawn fresh when you visit — close the tab and come back, and Tuesday is still the same killer it was at breakfast.
One honest wrinkle: when the rotation gives a weekend to the small board, you get its Hard rather than an Expert, because thirty-six squares genuinely cannot sustain more — the measurements behind that ceiling are laid out on the 6×6 page. Treat a weekend mini as the calendar's way of handing you a rest day you didn't ask for.
Streaks you cannot buy back
Miss a day and the calendar will happily let you return to it later: the grid rebuilds, the solve is recorded, the day is coloured in, and your totals, times and variety trophies all give it full credit. The one thing a late solve will never do is repair a streak. A day only feeds the chain if it was finished on that actual date, so a gap in your streak stays a gap forever, however diligently you fill the square behind it.
The streak measures showing up; the calendar measures catching up. Keeping the two honest about which is which is what makes the first one worth protecting.
This is stricter than it strictly had to be, and that is the point. A streak that can be reassembled after the fact is a count of enthusiasm, which the totals already record. A streak that can only be extended today is a small daily appointment, and the difference between the two is the entire reason streaks work on anyone.
Where the record lives, and why
Your calendar, your statistics and your trophy shelf are written to this browser's local storage and nowhere else. We think the bargain is worth stating plainly rather than being discovered the hard way: there is no sign-up and nothing about your play leaves your machine, and in exchange the record is as durable as the browser profile holding it. Clear site data and it is gone; open your phone instead of your laptop and you start a second, separate history.
The same choice explains something this page does not show. Sites with accounts like to report that you solved faster than some percentage of other players, a figure that requires collecting everyone's times. We collect nobody's, so any such number here would be an invention — and a daily ritual seems a poor place to be lied to. You are competing with the person who solved yesterday's grid, and both of you live in your browser.