Palon

Palon is a daily puzzle with nothing hidden in it. The whole day is laid out in front of you from the first move: every dot, where it falls, and in what order. Your dots join in all eight directions, and the moment you close a loop, everything inside it is yours. There is no luck to blame and no information you were not given — only how far ahead you were willing to look.

Most puzzles keep something back. Palon keeps nothing back. Before your first move you can see every dot that will arrive and the turn it arrives on, which means a bad day is never bad luck — it is a plan you could have made and did not.

The rules take one sentence each. Your dots join in all eight directions, including diagonals. Close a loop and everything inside it is yours. You cannot build where a dot is going to land. That is the entire game, and the depth comes from the schedule rather than from the rulebook.

It is mined from Točki, the graph-paper game played across school desks all over the former Soviet Union — dots, encirclement, and the small pleasure of a loop snapping shut. The mechanic is the same. The opponent is not: instead of a person, you are answering a published timetable, which is what makes it a daily rather than a duel.

Every day can be finished. That is a guarantee, not a hope — a solver plays each board before it is ever served and throws it away unless it can be completed with turns to spare. Three difficulties change how scattered the dots are, never how much you are shown, so a harder day asks you to see further rather than to be luckier.