About Interlude
A short break in the middle of something else. That is what the name means — from the Latin interludium, inter ("between") and ludus ("play") — and it is what the site is for.
What this is
A growing library of classic games, each playable two ways. Free play gives you unlimited randomly generated deals whenever you want them. The daily challenge gives everyone in the world the same puzzle on the same day, so your result actually means something next to somebody else's.
Every game is public domain — solitaires, mancala, word puzzles, sudoku. Nothing here is a version of a game somebody else owns.
One streak, not one per game
There is a single streak, and it covers the whole site. Finish any one daily and it survives the day. You never have to play all of them.
That is a deliberate choice, and the obvious alternative is worse. If keeping a streak meant clearing every daily, it would already be well over half an hour a day, everyone would break it in the first week, and it would get harder every time a game was added — punishing the people who had been here longest. A streak's only job is helping a habit form, and habits die from friction. So on a day when you have four minutes, you play one of the short ones and you are done.
Breadth is rewarded somewhere failure is cheap: badges, which are milestones you have passed rather than states you have to maintain. None of them can be lost.
Every puzzle is checked before it is dealt
This is the part worth explaining, because it is where daily puzzles usually go wrong.
A puzzle generated at random can be impossible, and on the day that happens nobody can tell — players assume they were not good enough, and every score on that day is meaningless. A leaderboard over an unsolvable puzzle is a lottery.
So puzzles here are not generated and hoped over. Each one is verified first, in the way its own game demands:
- Sudoku grids are built by removing digits only while what remains can still be solved by reasoning — never by guessing. That also guarantees exactly one solution, since every digit the checking solver placed was forced.
- Word Ladder puzzles are generated by walking the dictionary as a network, so a chain provably exists and the shortest possible answer is known exactly.
- Mancala layouts are searched before dealing, and kept only if every stone can be banked.
- Pyramid is scored on cards cleared rather than won or lost, so a deal nobody can finish still gives everybody a comparable number.
Where a game has an opponent, it plays with no randomness at all, so every player meets exactly the same replies to the same moves.
How the daily puzzle is made
Each puzzle comes from the date itself. The day's date and the game's name are combined into a number, and that number drives the shuffle. There is no server handing out puzzles — your browser works out the same deal everyone else's does.
Two things follow. Every past deal stays playable forever, because it can always be recreated from its own date; that is why the archive exists and costs nothing. And the day rolls over at your midnight, so wherever you are, you get the same puzzle as everyone else on your own calendar date.
No sign-in wall
Nothing here asks who you are before it lets you play. Open a game and it starts, which is rather the point of something you do in a spare few minutes.
Accounts are coming, because a streak living on a single device is a streak that disappears when you pick up your phone instead of your laptop — and because browsers quietly delete this kind of storage. When they arrive they will be optional, and they will be offered when you have something worth keeping rather than at the door. Playing will never require signing in.
Until then your history lives in your own browser. See the privacy page for exactly what is stored and what is not.
Who makes it
Interlude is an independent project, not a company. If something is broken, unfair, or just annoying, say so — that is genuinely how most of it has been fixed so far.