LinkedIn Launches Mini Sudoku Game as the Sixth Entry to Its Gaming Catalogue

LinkedIn launched a new game, Mini Sudoku, on its professional social networking platform on Tuesday. The game, which is a modern take on the classic puzzle, is available to all users. It also marks the sixth entry in the platform's gaming catalogue, a new service which started in May 2024. Interestingly, LinkedIn's team conceptualised the game design after an interaction with the original populariser of Sudoku, Japanese publisher Nikoli. The company says each game is designed by a Sudoku champion.

Mini Sudoku Comes to LinkedIn

In a post, Lakshman Somasundaram, Senior Director of Product at LinkedIn, announced the arrival of the new game to the platform. Mini Sudoku on LinkedIn is a six-by-six grid-based puzzle where users have to find the missing numbers to ensure each row, column, and region has the entire series of numbers between one and six (both inclusive).

The company says this version of the game should only require two to three minutes to complete. A new puzzle is released each day. Interested individuals can find the game here.

Somasundaram highlighted that each puzzle is designed by Thomas Snyder, a 3x World Sudoku Champion. He also designs daily grids for Queens, Tango, and Zip. As per the post, the Monday puzzles will be the easiest, and the difficulty will keep progressing throughout the week.

Interestingly, before creating the new game, the LinkedIn Games team met the Nikoli team in person and discussed the vision for the game. Notably, while the game was first introduced by Dell Puzzle Magazines in 1979 and was called Number Place, Nikoli is credited with the Sudoku (short for Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru, meaning “the digits must be single/unique”) name and the modern rules of the game.

Currently, LinkedIn offers five other games on its platform, including Pinpoint, Cross-Climb, Queens, Tango, and Zip. These are all daily, bite-sized puzzle games available to all users for free. The games were likely introduced by the platform to boost its average time spent and other engagement metrics, a trick successfully mastered by Facebook in the 2010s, and later implemented by modern-day platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and YouTube.