Three daily puzzles. No fluff.
Word Ladder, Daily Detective, and Color Matcher. All free, all in your browser. New challenges every morning at midnight. No sign-up, no app, no ads before your first move.
Today's daily challenges
Two of the three games refresh every day with new puzzles. Come back tomorrow for a completely new set.
Today's lineup
Color Matcher is available any time. Play it whenever you want a quick break.
All three games, right here
Two more are in development. We will add them when they are genuinely ready.
Change one letter at a time to climb from the starting word to the target. Five puzzles per day, from quick warm-ups to genuinely tricky ones. Hints are there if you get stuck, but they cost you a point.
Five short mystery cases every day. You get a scene, a list of suspects, and a set of clues. Read carefully, think it through, then name your suspect. No guessing, pure logic. Cases are PG-rated.
A color flashes on screen for three seconds. Then it disappears, and you mix it from scratch using sliders. The closer your match, the higher your score. Surprisingly difficult. Not surprisingly addictive.
The schoolyard classic. Toss the coin, pick bat or bowl, show your fingers, score your runs. Full hand animations. Almost ready.
Five emoji riddles per day covering films, phrases, places, and songs. Decode the sequence and type your answer. In development.
Pick a game and start playing
Literally that. No tutorial screen, no loading bar that pretends to personalize your experience.
Open any game
Tap a card above. The game loads in your browser, no app required, no account, nothing to install.
Play at your own pace
Most games take between two and five minutes. Do all three in a row or come back for one later in the day.
Come back tomorrow
Word Ladder and Daily Detective reset at midnight with a completely new set of puzzles. Your streak is saved locally.
That is genuinely all
No push notifications asking you to maintain your streak. No seven-day reminder emails. Just puzzles.
We kept it simple on purpose
Most puzzle sites try to become apps. We decided not to.
No tracking across websites
We do not sell your data or follow you around the web. Your scores stay in your browser. That is the whole privacy policy.
Puzzles that respect your time
Every game is designed to end in under five minutes. There are no extra lives to buy, no timers built to create panic.
Honest ads, nothing worse
The site runs display ads from Google AdSense. That is how we pay the hosting bill. No pop-ups, no video that autoplays, no interstitial between puzzles.
Built for phones first
All three games work on a phone with a slow connection. No large downloads, no heavy frameworks, no layout that breaks on small screens.
What DailyBrain actually is
DailyBrain started from a fairly simple frustration. The puzzle apps we played all felt like they were trying to become something bigger than puzzles. Five megabytes to download before you see the first question. A video ad before the first move. A subscription popup after the third. Puzzles should not feel like that.
So we built something smaller. Three games right now, two more in development. Word Ladder has been around in some form since Lewis Carroll invented it in 1877, and it is still one of the best vocabulary tests you can play in two minutes. The detective cases are original puzzles written by hand, not generated by any tool. Color Matcher came from a genuine argument about whether our design team had good eyes. They mostly do not.
The whole site runs on a slow phone. Streaks are stored in your browser, not on a server. If you clear your browser data, your streak resets, which is a fair tradeoff for not having an account. If you find a puzzle that has the wrong answer, write to us. We fix mistakes fast. Contact page is here.
Common questions
Do I need an account to play?
How many Word Ladder puzzles are there each day?
Are the Daily Detective cases actually new every day?
What does the Color Matcher game actually test?
When are the other two games coming?
Is this safe for kids?
How does DailyBrain make money?
My streak reset. Can you fix it?
Reads about puzzles and why they matter
The case for short daily friction over heroic weekend sessions. Consistency wins, even in small doses.
A short history of the doublet puzzle, how it spread, and why it is still the best vocabulary game around.
Toss, hand signs, scoring, the no-thumb rule, and why six fingers always means out. A proper explainer.