The Daily Skyscrapers Puzzle

Today’s skyline, at any side from 4×4 to 6×6. It is cut from today’s date, which is why yours and everybody else’s are the same board.

Puzzle #34 Hard Time 0:00 Filled 0/25

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Show mistakesShow the clock

A hard 5×5 board with 6 numbers round the rim. Pick a cell, then a height — or press the pencil to write candidates.

Check this before you rely on it. This skyscrapers puzzle generator is provided free and without warranty, and its results are not professional advice.

Your record

—Current streak
—Longest streak
—Days played
—Best time, this size

The calendar is the setter

No server keeps a board of the day here and hands it out on request; the date does that job by itself. The date becomes a number, the number drives every choice the generator makes, and the same number therefore lays out the same city and rubs out the same rim numbers on any machine running this code, with no coordination and no request.

That arrangement asks more of this puzzle than of most. A skyline is not laid down and then pruned once — a square is filled, its four sides are read off it, and the numbers are then removed one at a time with the whole board re-solved after every removal. Your browser does not so much fetch today’s board as rebuild it, running a few hundred small checks in the time the page takes to settle.

Because the whole thing is a function of the date, every board is reconstructible for ever. A link to a Thursday in March opens the exact skyline people were filling in that Thursday, five years from now, on a computer that has never contacted this site.

Monday is the wall

Difficulty follows the weekday, read in UTC so everybody turns the page at the same moment. Monday is the hardest day of this week and Sunday and Thursday are the gentlest, with the rest arranged so that no two days running are the same.

That shape was chosen against the other sections rather than in isolation. Every puzzle on this site peaks on a different day of the week, so somebody working through all of them meets one board they can finish and one to grow into on most mornings, instead of a wall on every section at once and then a week of warm-ups.

Side is an independent choice and does not touch the difficulty at all. A gentle 6×6 is a long sit rather than a hard one — the same few observations, made twenty more times. Pick the side for the time you have and the day for how much you want to be made to think.

The streak, the clock and what a hint really costs

Finishing any one side records the day. Playing all three does not record three, there is no table to climb, and the number is only a record of having turned up — which is the one honest thing a daily puzzle can measure about anybody.

Asking for a hint costs the streak nothing. It names the rung it used and points at the page teaching that rung, which is the entire reason this site has technique pages at all — a hint that only filled a lot in would teach you nothing and would leave you stuck again four moves later. What a hint does cost is honesty in the shareable line: the text you copy states the number you took, because a finish with five hints and a finish with none are not the same finish.

If a running clock spoils the puzzle for you, switch it off; the choice is remembered and the board plays exactly the same without it. Everything the site knows about your record — the streak, the days finished, the fastest time at each side — sits in this browser and is never sent anywhere, so clearing site data for this domain erases it permanently and nobody here can put it back.

Common questions

Does everybody get the same skyscrapers board each day?

Yes. It is built from the date rather than delivered from anywhere, and every step of the build is deterministic, so one date and one side produce an identical board in every browser on earth.

When does the daily skyline change?

At midnight UTC, so a reader in Auckland and a reader in Los Angeles are always working on the same board rather than on yesterday’s and today’s.

Why does a 6×6 take a moment to appear?

Because it is being made rather than fetched. Each rim number is removed and the whole board re-solved before the removal is accepted, which is several hundred checks for a board of that side.