Daily Sleuth
A new case file from Caldmere every morning. Investigate the suspects, walk the locations, spend your clues carefully, and name who, where and why. Five guesses. Lower score wins.
Daily puzzle games are mostly words and numbers. I wanted one with a place. A detective puzzle only works if the town has continuity — the suspect you cleared last week has to still be around, and the diner has to be where it was. That meant writing a whole town before writing a single case.
Caldmere: a small town on the Maine coast where everyone knows everyone. Every day a new case lands with three suspects who had motive and three who had access. You can request up to four free clues, then accuse: who, where and why. Score is clues used times two plus guesses used, so restraint matters. Difficulty ramps through the week from Open & Shut on Monday to a Cold Case on Saturday, and rank tiers run from Beat Cop to Super Sleuth. There’s an archive, a leaderboard, and a newsletter for the people who can’t stop.