The Doppit Almanac · No. 11

Matchit, a daily logic-grid original

Pin every entry to its place

What it is

Matchit is a Doppit original in the logic-grid tradition. Picture a county fair's prize register: a handful of fairgoers, each holding one prize entry and one ribbon rank, first through last. The clues arrive as small woodcut icons, never as sentences, and a correspondence grid waits below them to be filled.

Your business is to read what the clues force, cell by cell, and pin every fairgoer to a ribbon and an entry.

How it plays

Mark the grid one deduction at a time. A dot pins a pair, a cross rules it out.

• Every row and every column of each panel holds exactly one dot. One ribbon and one entry per fairgoer, and back again.
• An equals clue joins a pair, a slashed equals keeps two apart, and the ribbon clues read earlier-than, next-to, and between.
• A dot ripples outward: cross the rest of its row and its column, then chain the marks across the panels.
• There is always a forced next step and exactly one answer. No square asks for a guess.

The difficulties

Registers come in four weights. Easy is a thirty-second to one-minute warm-up on a three-by-three board. Medium widens to four entrants and leans on deductions chained across the panels. A hard register brings in the ribbon-order clues and asks for one careful what-if, a proper three to four minutes at the desk. An Expert register is the split-clue variant: most tiles show three pairings divided by slashes, at least one of which holds, and the solve wants what-ifs one layer deeper, a good eight to eleven minutes. The built-in hint points at the square to study before it fills it, and a new register is posted every day, free.

Nearby in the almanac: Rankit, Spyit and Copyit