Plots (Puzzleship)

Plots follows the Japanese puzzle Shikaku, whose name means roughly divide into squares. The grid holds clues, and you draw rectangles so that every rectangle contains exactly one clue, every cell ends up in one rectangle, and nothing overlaps. A classic clue gives an area; Plots adds shape clues that say a rectangle must be square, wide or tall.

Because nothing may overlap and nothing may be left over, a rectangle in the wrong place usually breaks a region somewhere else. The useful question is which clue can own each cell: a cell that only one clue can reach must belong to it. Puzzleship notes that LinkedIn's Patches uses a similar idea and that Plots is not affiliated with it.

Puzzleship publishes six grids of Plots a day, graded from very easy to ultra hard. Each day's grids are numbered and dated, the same for every player, and go live at 13:00 UTC, which is 9:00 in New York in summer, even though the page says the next set comes at midnight in your own time; earlier days stay playable in the archive. The site is free with ads, and a premium plan removes them.

The board fits a phone screen as well as a desktop one: you draw a rectangle by dragging across the cells, and undo and redo buttons sit beside the grid. Players who like a quiet, exact logic grid with a choice of difficulty each morning will find it suits them.