Educational games

This is the smallest shelf on the site and the only one where every entry is ours. Educational here does not mean simplified — it means the puzzle is built on something you actually know, so getting better at it makes you better at the thing itself rather than at the game.

Two of them are about words. Word Circuit gives you six attempts at a five-letter answer and colours each letter by how close you came, which is a deduction exercise wearing a spelling costume. Word Ladder is the older idea: climb from one four-letter word to another changing a single letter per rung, and discover that the letter you most want to change is usually the one holding the chain together.

The other two are about counting and clues. Sum Cross fills runs of squares with digits that hit a given total, where the real work is the crossings rather than the arithmetic. Mini Clue Grid is a compact crossword with clues written here, sized for a few minutes instead of a Sunday morning.

The newest is about scale. Scale Guess shows two real AI models, from a 1950s maze-solving mouse to this year’s frontier systems, and asks which took more computing to train. The numbers come from Epoch AI’s public research data, and each answer ends with a short note on both models.

All five change every day. The four puzzles are checked to have exactly one answer before they are served, and Scale Guess only pairs two models when the gap between them is larger than both estimates’ uncertainty combined.