Hear me out: LinkedIn actually has fun games on it. I’m not joking. There are games buried underneath all the posts from CEOs disrupting industries through the power of AI, and they’re actually kind of good.
My favorite is Zip, a game about filling up a grid with a continuous line. It’s a daily puzzle, like Wordle, where each day you have to fill a grid by connecting a series of numbers in order. You can’t leave any gaps, so you need to plan out how many detours you need to make to cover the whole thing. It honestly is more complicated to describe than to actually play it, but trust me, it’s really satisfying.
My second favorite is Queens because it’s like Sudoku without the numbers. For a number (and math) hater like me, it’s perfect. It’s played on a five-by-five grid with colored squares, and the goal is to fill it with queens that don’t share the same columns, rows, or colors. It goes pretty fast as you mark off all the squares that can’t be a queen with Xs. Playing it gives me the same rush as finishing a particularly long Sudoku puzzle in a fraction of the time. And the best part is that it’s designed so you don’t have to make any guesses.
Word game lovers will probably like Pinpoint and Crossclimb. Pinpoint gives you a series of words and you have to guess what category they all fit in. For example: If it gives you “banana” and “apple”, the answer will probably be “fruit”. Crossclimb is a little harder. You have to type in words based on hints and then stack them so that each word is only off by one letter (e.g. pace and pack). After you’ve done that successfully, the last two words on the top and bottom open up. Guessing these is a little easier because you know they have to be one letter off of what’s already there.
The last game, Tango, is the most complicated one of the bunch. It’s essentially about following a bunch of rules to deduce where to place sun and moon icons. I imagine the kind of people who love Sudoku puzzles that start out nearly empty will like making guesses and double-checking everything until it’s solved. Sadly, I am not that person.
I never expected to willingly spend an hour on LinkedIn every day, but here I am. Does it give me the urge to start using it as a real social media site to connect with like-minded people? Absolutely not. I will continue to play my silly little games and then peace out. But you should know you’re missing out on the one good thing about LinkedIn if you’re not already playing these.
