Look, we all know LinkedIn is a hellhole. Despite this, it’s weirdly popular with young people, and terribly useful for journalists. Back in May, LinkedIn tried to lighten the mood of applying for jobs that don’t exist and having screeds from AI evangelists forced down your throat by adding games, and it recently added another. I regret to inform you that these games don’t suck.
I only started playing LinkedIn’s games recently, after my past Launcher colleague Mikhail Klimentov tweeted that they’re good. Mikhail is an inveterate shitposter, so I was prepared not to believe him, but dammit, he’s right. While aesthetically they look pulled straight off the pages of The New York Times, they’re not knockoffs: Queens is a sort of Minesweeper meets sudoku, where you use deduction to place a chess queen in rows, columns, and colored regions. Pinpoint feels like a less satisfying version of the Times’ Connections, where you guess the category various word clues relate to. Tango involves filling a grid with either suns or moons. And Crossclimb is kind of like a crossword puzzle, where you answer clues by changing one letter in each word.
The word games, Crossclimb and Pinpoint, lack the quality of clues that the Times’ games have, and since you only see one clue at a time in Pinpoint, it feels a little guess-heavy. I do like Crossclimb a lot, which combines answering clues with some interesting wordplay. Queens initially baffled me but now I’m totally into it, digging the way the wide-open field gets narrowed down as you think things through. Tango scratches my logic puzzle itch while being chill enough not to derail my morning. I have no desire to share my scores with my LinkedIn network or to develop a streak or any of the other gimmicks the puzzles have in an effort to get me to spend more time on LinkedIn, but I am looking forward to playing tomorrow’s puzzles, which is weird because it means I’m looking forward to visiting LinkedIn.
While obviously every place on the internet is just trying to get a slice of the Times’ games pie, I do like that all these semi-knockoffs means we’re getting alternatives. Like probably many of you, I have a complicated relationship to the Times’ games, which are undeniably good but hard to support. (A part of the Times that isn’t hard to support, incidentally, is the Times Tech Guild and their current contract fight.) I appreciate the lightness of LinkedIn’s games when compared to, say, Polygon’s Puzzmo offerings, several of which are some of my favorite games on my phone but are a little too long or mentally intensive to be good choices for starting my day, especially now that I don’t commute. (Case in point: I started writing this blog a few hours ago, went to check out the Puzzmo games, and now I’m still writing this blog.) LinkedIn’s games feel like they could occupy the same place that some of the Times’ games have for me, short brain warmups that I can play and then move on from, rather than games I dig in to play.
Anyway, all this has caused me to write far more words about LinkedIn than I’ve ever wanted to, thus playing right into LinkedIn’s hands, but credit where it’s due. The games have their own page, so you don’t have to go to your LinkedIn proper to access them, though because it’s LinkedIn I can now see that I have a ton of unread messages and notifications, few of which are relevant to me in any way. But if you are someone in my network who’d like to give Aftermath millions of dollars because I’m faster at Queens than you, please get in touch.
