Data study · data through Sep 9
LinkedIn's unannounced difficulty schedule
We measured every board LinkedIn has published across its six daily grid games, 2,768 in all, captured live at each day's drop and back-verified to each game's launch. LinkedIn itself hints the week gets harder but has never published a schedule; measured by board size, here is exactly how much, game by game: Zip, Queens, Wend and Patches grow toward the weekend, while Tango and Mini Sudoku keep the same board size nearly every day (Tango has left 6×6 exactly once): if their difficulty moves at all, it must move through the clues, which this dataset does not measure.
The +96% figure rests on 93 boards, our youngest game; the step itself is a discrete 25→49-cell jump.
Median board size by weekday
Cells per board, Monday to Sunday, across each game's full history. Shared scale.
36 cells Mon–Thu, 49 Fri–Sun — weekends run 36% larger than weekdays (Friday counts as a weekday here).
49 cells Mon, 64 Tue–Wed, 81 Thu–Sun — weekends run 27% larger than weekdays.
Flat week: every day holds 36-cell boards.
Flat week: every day holds 36-cell boards.
25 cells Mon–Wed, 36 Thu–Fri, 49 Sat–Sun — weekends run 96% larger than weekdays.
36 cells Mon–Wed, 49 Thu–Sat, 64 Sun — weekends run 78% larger than weekdays.
The same numbers, as a table
Swipe the table sideways for the weekend columns →
| Game | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun | Weekend vs weekdays |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zip | 36 | 36 | 36 | 36 | 49 (weekly peak) | 49 (weekly peak) | 49 (weekly peak) | +36% |
| Queens | 49 | 64 | 64 | 81 (weekly peak) | 81 (weekly peak) | 81 (weekly peak) | 81 (weekly peak) | +27% |
| Tango | 36 | 36 | 36 | 36 | 36 | 36 | 36 | flat |
| Mini Sudoku | 36 | 36 | 36 | 36 | 36 | 36 | 36 | flat |
| Wend | 25 | 25 | 25 | 36 | 36 | 49 (weekly peak) | 49 (weekly peak) | +96% |
| Patches | 36 | 36 | 36 | 49 | 49 | 49 | 64 (weekly peak) | +78% |
Tinted cells mark each game's largest day or days. The weekend column compares the median of all Saturday and Sunday boards with the median of all Monday to Friday boards. Half-cell medians (72.5, 56.5) are normal: the median of an even number of boards can fall between two grid sizes. Friday's jump counts as a weekday in this split, which makes the weekend figures conservative.
The largest board each game has ever run
Swipe sideways for all columns →
| Game | Puzzle | First reached | Grid | Cells | Boards at this size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zip | #18 | Apr 4, 2025 | 8×8 | 64 | 64 |
| Queens | #5 | May 5, 2024 | 11×11 | 121 | 32 |
| Tango | #321 | Aug 24, 2025 | 8×8 | 64 | 1 |
| Mini Sudoku | #1 | Aug 12, 2025 | 6×6 | 36 | every board |
| Wend | #19 | Jun 27, 2026 | 8×8 | 64 | 2 |
| Patches | #18 | Apr 4, 2026 | 8×8 | 64 | 38 |
For Zip we also maintain a full structural difficulty index, walls and checkpoints included, on the hardest Zip puzzles page.
Tango's single 8×8 (#321, a Sunday) was a one-off: every other Tango board has been 6×6. And biggest is not hardest: Queens' 11×11 landed in the game's very first week, while the boards players remember as hardest are mid-sized grids with vicious region geometry. Board size also plateaus from Friday, but Zip's full structural index keeps climbing to a Sunday peak (median 37 vs 29.5 on Saturday).
Method
- Source
- Our own measurement archive: boards captured live at each day's drop, plus a historical backfill reconstructed from independent public sources (published solve videos and archived posts) and cross-checked board by board — a 2,541-board verification sweep of the historical archive in August 2026; boards published since are captured live. Coverage: May 1, 2024 to Sep 9, 2026.
- Measure
- Grid area in cells, the one dimension all six games share. A structural proxy for difficulty, not a solve-time claim — and a conservative one: for Zip, where we also score full structure (walls, turns, checkpoint gaps), the same weekend jump appears, with weekday medians of 14–24 against 29.5 on Saturday and 37 on Sunday.
- Statistic
- Medians per weekday, never means, so a single oversized board cannot move a day of the week. Weekend figures compare the median of all Saturday and Sunday boards with the median of all Monday to Friday boards. For games that ramp through the week, these pooled medians land near the smallest weekday and the largest weekend sizes: the ratios describe the week's full sweep, not the average board.
- Robustness
- Split any game's history into chronological halves and its weekend ratio is unchanged in both (Zip +36/+36, Queens +27/+27, Wend +96/+96, Patches +78/+78): a standing schedule, not a relic of one era.
- Limits
- Grid area is blind to clue-level difficulty, so for the two fixed-grid games we can only say the grid never moves. Wend's +96% is the least settled figure here: with 83 boards and discrete sizes, the true weekend step reads between +36% and +96%. Public per-puzzle solve times do not exist outside LinkedIn's app, which is why we measure structure.
- Freshness
- Recomputed from the archive on every daily build; each build replaces the previous cut, and the update stamp reflects the daily data append, not editorial revision. Cite the dataset by its data-through date, currently 2026-09-09.
How to cite
AWA Games (2026), "The LinkedIn Games Difficulty Schedule, Measured", linkedinzip.solutions/linkedin-games-difficulty-study/
CC BY 4.0 covers this dataset of our measurements (game, date, grid dimensions). The puzzles themselves remain the property of LinkedIn Corporation and are not included.
We run a puzzle-answers site; this archive is the byproduct of solving all six games every morning, and this page is what the byproduct is for. AWA Games is an independent project, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by LinkedIn Corporation. Press and researchers: for custom cuts, charts or questions about the data, write to support@linkedinzip.solutions.