Daily Murder

Daily Murder is a deduction grid disguised as an English-style murder mystery novel. Each day a case appears with its setting (a boarding school cut off from the world by a storm, the family notary found amid overturned furniture), its victim, its number of suspects and that day's difficulty. Beneath the narrative, the tools are those of a logic puzzle: three tabs, EVIDENCE for the statements, CASE BOARD, and GRID for the checkbox grid. The instruction fits on three words printed under the start button: "Use logic. Never guess."

1. Open the briefing from CASE BRIEFING: an illustration of the scene, the account of the discovery, the victim's name.
2. Go to the EVIDENCE tab and read the statements. Each is labeled with who speaks it, the inspector or the housekeeper.
3. Record your eliminations in the GRID tab, the grid that crosses the suspects with the weapons and the locations.
4. The third tab, CASE BOARD, complements EVIDENCE and GRID in the case bar.

Because the setting is treated seriously. The briefings are illustrated, written in manor-house English, and make you want to read before ticking boxes, which is rare for a logic grid, a format that usually settles for a list of constraints. Daily Murder takes the opposite approach: first a scene, then the mechanics, and it assigns each statement to someone so that reading remains an act of police work rather than a mere tallying. It nonetheless keeps the core promise: a puzzle where guessing is not part of the design.

The practice case opens with a tutorial that occupies twelve screens. What the game displays on arrival is its contract, "Use logic. Never guess.", repeated in the site's description. In other words, a board designed so you do not check anything until a statement forces it, and where the GRID tab serves as memory rather than as judge.

Case of the Day

Dated and labeled with a difficulty, MEDIUM for instance, with its number of suspects announced under the narrative.

Practice case

A practice case reduced to two suspects, two weapons and two locations, paired with a twelve-step tutorial, with a "Skip, I know how this works" link to skip it.

CASE FILES

An entry in the top bar, next to STATS and SOCIAL.

• The practice case is smaller than the daily case and its tutorial can be skipped with a link. Doing it once costs less than discovering the three tabs on a medium-level case.
• The number of suspects is announced under the narrative, even before the start button: it's the best gauge of what awaits you, more reliable than the difficulty label.
• The setting is not neutral. The storm that cuts the telephone line and the house from which no one left are there to close off the suspect list: the narrative bounds the problem as much as it dresses it.