About · Mimzo Games

Mimzo Games is a daily puzzle site. Five puzzles go up every day, the same five for everybody, and finishing any one of them keeps your streak going. Everything is free and plays in a browser.

There are five games: Sudoku, Word Guess, Word Search, Number Merge and Memory Match. Each has four difficulty levels, and each has its rules and a few honest tips written out under the board.

How the puzzles are made

Every board is generated and then checked before it is published. A Sudoku is only published if a solver confirms it has exactly one answer and can be reached by reasoning - no board here needs a guess. A Word Search is only published if every word in the list is actually in the grid, and the Word Guess answers come from a hand-reviewed list rather than a dictionary dump, so the word of the day is always an ordinary word somebody would use.

The answer never reaches your browser. Boards arrive without their solution, your moves are replayed on the server when you finish, and the score comes from that replay. It keeps scores honest, and it is also why a puzzle needs a connection to start.

How scoring works

The difficulty sets the base: Easy is worth 600 points, medium 1,000, hard 1,500 and expert 2,200. Everything below is a multiplier on that, which is why picking an easier tier to farm points does not work.
Time nudges it, gently: Each tier has a normal time - four minutes on easy, twenty on expert. Beat it and you score up to half again; take twice as long and you still keep about three quarters. The multiplier never drops below half, however long you leave a puzzle sitting there.
Mistakes cost a little: Every mistake the replay finds takes about three percent off. On Sudoku that is a number clashing with the grid; on Word Guess it is each guess before the right one; on Memory Match it is a pair you turned over and lost.
Unfinished still pays, failed does not: Stopping, or running out of guesses, scores part credit - showing up counts for something. Running out of mistakes on Sudoku is different: that board scores zero, because it was still winnable when it ended. Either way the day counts toward your streak, and neither earns XP: that is for puzzles you finish.

Streaks

One puzzle a day keeps it: Finish any puzzle and the day is counted. It does not have to be the daily board, and it does not have to be hard.
Late nights count as the day before: The day rolls over at 3am in your own timezone, not at midnight UTC. A puzzle finished at 1:30am belongs to the day you have not gone to bed from yet.
One missed day is forgiven: Miss a single day and a streak freeze is spent for you: the streak carries on and you are told afterwards. One freeze per calendar month, and it covers one day - miss two in a row and the streak starts again at one.
Milestones are worth points: Three days, a week, a fortnight, a month, 60 days, 100 and a year each come with a badge and a bonus. The daily bonus grows with the streak too, up to a cap.

XP and levels

XP is separate from your score. A score belongs to one board; XP adds up across everything you have ever played and never goes down.

Finishing a puzzle: +20 XP, every time.
Finishing the daily board: +50 XP on top of that.
Clearing all five dailies: +100 XP for the full set.
Keeping a streak: +10 XP per day of streak, up to 50 XP a day.

Beginner: Where everybody starts, level 1.
Explorer: Level 2, from 500 XP.
Thinker: Level 3, from 2,000 XP.
Strategist: Level 4, from 5,000 XP.
Master: Level 5, from 12,000 XP.
Champion: Level 6, from 30,000 XP.

Accounts, and playing without one

You never have to sign up. Play, build a streak, earn badges - all of it works on a first visit with nothing typed in. What you get is kept against this browser, which means clearing your browser data, or picking up your phone instead, starts you over.

An account fixes exactly that: it carries your streak, your XP and your badges between devices. It needs an email address and a password, nothing else, and the privacy policy says what happens to both.

Your display name is assigned on your first visit and cannot be changed. That is deliberate. A name that appears next to a high score is a name that would otherwise need moderating, and a two-person site cannot moderate names around the clock.

What this is not

These are puzzles, for entertainment. They are not brain training. Nothing here is designed or tested to improve memory, intelligence or any other measure of cognitive performance, and you should be skeptical of any puzzle site that tells you otherwise.