Read from the SlowDen catalogue on 11 September 2026. Counts change as games are added.
The short version. There are 13 daily puzzle games on SlowDen — sudoku, nonograms, cryptic clues, word grids, riddles, trivia and a map-drawing game — and each one publishes a new puzzle every day, free, in a browser tab, with no download and no account needed to play. The full list is a few paragraphs down. Every single one arrived as a developer submission. Not one of the 200 partner titles in the catalogue works this way.
It is a game that gives you one puzzle and then stops. Everyone playing gets the same puzzle on the same day. When you have solved it, that is the day’s game over — there is no next level queued up, no energy bar refilling, nothing to grind.
That sounds like a limitation and it is the entire point. A daily puzzle is a five-minute habit you can finish, which is close to the opposite of how most browser games are built. It is also why people keep coming back to the same page every morning for years.
The format has a shape you can spot from the outside: a puzzle tied to a date, one shared answer, usually a streak counter, and an ending. Sudoku A Day states it about as plainly as it can be stated — one handcrafted puzzle each morning, and deliberately no timer.
All 13, grouped by what kind of thinking they ask for, with the developer credited beside each one. 5 of them open on the developer’s own site — SlowDen links straight there rather than putting the game in a frame.
Between them they come from 13 different developers. None of these games was made by SlowDen, and none of them is ranked here — SlowDen does not count plays, so there is no most-played list to publish and we are not going to invent one.
This is the part worth reading even if you only came for the list.
SlowDen’s catalogue is 288 games from 197 studios, and it comes from two very different places. 200 are partner titles that arrive through a syndication catalogue — the same pool a lot of browser-game sites draw from. 88 were sent in directly by the people who built them, from 84 developers. 0 were made by SlowDen.
All 13 daily puzzles are in the second group. Zero are in the first.
We checked that the honest way round rather than just counting tags. Searching all 200 partner entries for the word “daily” turns up 3, and not one of them is a daily-reset game: two use the word to mean everyday life (“switch off from daily worries”, “prepares you for your daily life”) and the third is a restaurant simulator with a daily login reward inside an ongoing save. Those are different things wearing the same word.
The reason is structural, not mysterious. A syndication catalogue distributes a game file that any site can embed; a daily puzzle needs a server that decides what today’s puzzle is and remembers your streak. That is a thing a developer runs themselves, on their own domain, which is why 5 of these 13 live on the developer’s own site rather than inside a player. It is also why 140 of SlowDen’s 176 studios have exactly one game here — these are mostly one-person projects, not catalogue output.
Practical consequence: this shelf is the one part of SlowDen that cannot be copied from the same catalogue everybody else buys from. If you found a daily puzzle here that you liked, it very probably is not on the other browser-game sites you have tried.
Not to play, and several say so on their own front pages rather than leaving you to find out.
Worth being precise about what “free” means here: these games are free to play, but each developer runs their own site on their own terms, and some of them offer paid extras or apps alongside the free daily puzzle. Sudoku A Day has an iPhone app, for instance. Nothing on this page is behind a payment to play today’s puzzle.
A daily word game is only playable if it speaks your language, and three of these do more than one:
The rest are English as listed. Two of the 13 sidestep language entirely: Nonograms.games is numbers and squares, and Country Draw is a map. If English is not your first language, those two and Sudoku A Day are the ones that need none of it.
That is the honest weakness of the format, and several of these developers solved it themselves rather than pretending it does not exist:
If you would rather move to a different kind of puzzle altogether, SlowDen’s Puzzle shelf holds 37 games and this walk through all 37 groups them by mood. 4 of the 13 daily games on this page are filed there; the other 9 sit on the Community shelf with the rest of the 72 developer submissions, because a trivia quiz and a map-drawing game are not really puzzle-shelf games.
A game that publishes one puzzle and then stops until tomorrow. Everyone playing gets the same puzzle on the same day, and when it is solved there is nothing more to grind. That reset is the whole appeal: it is a five-minute habit rather than an open-ended session.
13. 14 entries in the catalogue carry a daily tag, and one of those — VEYRA — uses "daily" to mean a daily free-play allowance rather than a puzzle that changes, so it is not counted here.
Not to play. Gridling states plainly that it uses no accounts and no advertising; WitLocked Daily Lock needs no download and no account. Where an account appears at all it is optional and it is there to carry a streak between devices — The Daily Cryptic lets you solve as a guest and only asks if you want the streak saved.
The Daily Leak puts a number on it: one shared puzzle a day, about five minutes. The Daily Cryptic is a single clue, and Riddle of the Day is a single riddle, so both are shorter still. Sudoku a Day deliberately runs no timer at all.
Some. Gridling lists English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Riddle of the Day publishes in Spanish and English. Histoguessr's interface is in Spanish. The rest are English as listed.
No. SlowDen made none of the 265 games listed here — 200 are partner titles, 65 came directly from the developers who built them, and 0 are SlowDen Originals. All 13 daily puzzles on this page are developer submissions and stay the property of the people credited beside them.
Yes. They open in the browser tab you already have, with no download, no installer and no SlowDen account. Several run on the developer's own site, which SlowDen links to rather than framing.
Built a daily puzzle? This is exactly the kind of game SlowDen wants and cannot get from a catalogue — it runs on your server, keeps your streaks, and stays yours. Send it here; it does not have to be a challenge entry. 65 of the 265 games listed on SlowDen arrived that way, and 13 of those reset every morning. If you would rather build one to a brief, Slow Cook hands out creative challenges and a chance to be featured — check the page for the current round.
Free puzzle games online, no download covers the 37-game Puzzle shelf. The games added this month is where the newest developer submissions land first. Browser games that work on a phone is the device question, and what actually works on a school network answers the one everybody types. Developers: how to submit a browser game to SlowDen.