Palon

Palon is a daily territory puzzle from the graph-paper classic: dots on a lattice, chains in all eight directions, and the moment your loop closes, every red dot inside it is captured. The reds arrive on a published schedule — the queue shows what is coming and exactly where it will land — and every arrival poses the same question four ways: fence it in, push it off course, build over its landing point, or let it fall. Twelve turns, one score, the same day for everyone.

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.

The rules take a sentence each. Your dots join in all eight directions, diagonals included. Close a loop and everything inside it is captured. And the only thing that ever refuses a placement is ground already taken — build straight over a point a red is headed for and the dot never arrives: you gain the ground and lose the prisoner. Place beside a landing point and the dot is shoved away as it falls. Cage, push, deny or ignore — every arrival is a decision, and the game prices it for you before you spend the turn.

The queue above the board shows what is coming — five events ahead on Easy, three on Standard, two on Hard — and nothing unseen can ever refuse you a move. Difficulty changes how many dots the day sends and how scattered they fall, never the rules: a harder day is a busier, messier one.

A day is scored, not solved. One point per captured dot, denials counted beside the score and never added into it, and the day ends when the twelve turns do. Before any board is served, a solver plays it and throws it away unless a careful line takes a real haul — so every morning is worth opening, though affording all of it is deliberately out of reach. The piece in your hand belongs to the weekday — a single dot on Monday, dominoes on Tuesday, corners, lines, the tee — and the days differ in character as well as in shape: Friday ranks by denials rather than captures, and Sunday sends its dots two at a time.

Today’s board is free in your browser — all three difficulties, the same verified day as everyone else, nothing to install. What the page does not do is remember: your streak, a half-played morning resumed where you left it, and the replay of your best capture all live in the app, which is out now on iPhone, iPad and Android.