Daily Stratagem Puzzle
One of the 36 Stratagems is chosen each day. Name it in five guesses: a wrong guess tells you whether you had the right set of six and unlocks the next clue, and the shareable result is squares only, so it spoils nothing. Five languages, runs entirely in your browser.
Daily Stratagem Puzzle
One stratagem a day. Name it in five guesses — a wrong guess tells you whether you were at least in the right set, and buys the next clue.
How to play
Read the first clue
You start with one clue: which of the six sets the stratagem belongs to. That narrows 36 down to 6 before you guess at all.
Guess from the list
Type or pick any of the 36. You never have to spell the Chinese — each is listed with its meaning in your language.
Use the near miss
A yellow square means right set, wrong stratagem — you read the situation correctly and picked the wrong move within it. That is five candidates left.
Share the grid, not the answer
The copied result is squares only. Whoever you send it to can see how you did and still play the same puzzle cold.
A daily game that teaches a taxonomy
Daily word games work because a single shared answer turns a private minute into a public one: everyone is solving the same thing, so the result is worth showing. What most of them do not do is leave you knowing anything afterwards. This one is built on a corpus that has a structure worth learning, and the structure is doing the work.
The Thirty-Six Stratagems are not a flat list. They come in six sets of six, grouped by the situation they suit — when you hold the advantage, when you are contesting an enemy, when you are attacking, when the field is in chaos, when you are fighting at close quarters, and when you are losing. That grouping is the whole reason this game has a middle state between right and wrong.
Why the yellow square is the game
A guess that names the wrong stratagem but the right set tells you something precise: your reading of the situation was correct, and only the move was wrong. That is a genuinely useful piece of information, and it is the rung a player climbs. Get a yellow square on your first guess and you have gone from thirty-six candidates to five. Get a white one and you have eliminated six at once.
Guess well and you learn a move. Guess badly and you learn the taxonomy, which is worth more.
The clue ladder is built the same way. The first rung is the set, which is broad. The middle rungs are the observable signs from our Counter-Stratagem Finder — not definitions, but the things you would actually notice if someone were running that move on you. Only the last rung comes close to giving it away.
What the rotation guarantees
The answer is a fixed function of the date, so every player in every language gets the same stratagem on the same day — without that, a shared grid would mean nothing. The sequence steps through the list in a cycle that visits all thirty-six exactly once every thirty-six days, so no stratagem is starved and none repeats early. The formula is frozen deliberately: changing it later would silently rewrite every past answer, and a grid shared last week would stop matching the puzzle it came from.
Why this exists instead of another article
The original plan for a daily feature here was a teaser page plus a thirty-six-day archive grid. Both were rejected, because they would have put the same prose on a fifth and a sixth URL and competed with the pages that own it. A game solves the same problem — a reason to come back — while republishing nothing: the puzzle carries no stratagem text at all, and the answer links out to the page that does.
A note for ASEAN players
The day turns over at 00:00 UTC, which is 08:00 in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and 07:00 in Jakarta. That is early enough to be a morning habit and late enough that a Sunday night in the region still belongs to Saturday's puzzle. The whole Art of War series runs on that clock, so the puzzle and the stratagem of the day change together rather than drifting a day apart.
Ten things worth knowing
The 36 Stratagems are grouped into six sets of six, from a position of advantage down to desperation.
That six-set structure is why a wrong guess can still be half right — the puzzle tells you when you had the right set.
Each stratagem is a four-character idiom (chengyu) still in everyday Chinese use.
The answer rotates on a 36-day cycle, so every stratagem comes up exactly once before any repeats.
The clues are the observable signs from our Counter-Stratagem Finder — what you would actually notice, not a definition.
Guess it first try and you see only one clue. Clues are bought with mistakes.
The shared grid carries no names and no clues — only squares, so it cannot spoil the day for whoever receives it.
Everything runs in your browser. Your guesses and streak stay on your device and are never uploaded.
The puzzle turns over at 00:00 UTC, which is 08:00 in Singapore — the same clock the rest of this series runs on.
The rotation is deterministic and frozen: the same date always gives the same puzzle, for everyone, forever.
Frequently asked questions
- One of the 36 Stratagems is chosen for the day. You have five guesses to name it. Each wrong guess tells you whether you at least had the right set of six, and unlocks the next clue.
- Right set, wrong stratagem. The 36 are grouped into six sets of six by the situation they suit, so a yellow square says your reading of the situation was right even though the move was not.
- Yes. The answer is a fixed function of the date, so the same day gives the same stratagem to every player in every language — which is what makes a shared grid comparable.
- Not until all 36 have been used. The rotation steps through the list in a cycle that visits every stratagem exactly once every 36 days, so none is starved and none repeats early.
- From our Counter-Stratagem Finder, which describes each stratagem by what you would observe rather than by what it is called. That makes the middle clues genuinely useful rather than a restatement of the name.
- No. Guesses and streak live in your browser's local storage and are never uploaded. Clearing your browser data resets them, and no account exists to recover them from.
- No. It carries the puzzle number and a row of coloured squares — no stratagem name, no clue text. Someone who receives it can see how you did without learning anything about the answer.
- At 00:00 UTC, which is 08:00 in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, and 07:00 in Jakarta. The whole Art of War series runs on that clock, so the puzzle and the stratagem of the day turn over together.
- No. Every stratagem is listed with its meaning in your language, and you can pick from the list rather than type. The Chinese is shown alongside because the names are four-character idioms worth recognising.
- Every puzzle links to that stratagem's own page, with its historical origin, an explanation and modern applications. The full library, the Art of War's thirteen chapters and a map of how they connect are all linked from the sidebar.
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