Fair play

All eleven daily puzzles are seeded deterministically: every player on Earth gets the same Sudoku Easy / Nonograms Hard / Loop Medium / etc. for any given day. That makes leaderboards meaningful and streaks honest.

The trust pyramid

Different competitive surfaces apply different validation strictness (this is the puzzle.day-internal cycle-18 trust pyramid — borrowed from published Star Battle / Latice anti-cheat research):

• Friends boards / coop matches: trust-on-honor. No replay validation — the cost of one cheater is bounded to one social graph.
• Global leaderboards: server-side replay validation. Your move log is checked against the puzzle. Implausible move pacing (< 50 ms between events) flags the submission.
• Tournaments: global validation + behavioural signal. Uniform move pacing (variance/mean too low) flags as bot-like. Tournament submissions also feed a manual review queue when flagged.

What we don't do

• No false-positive auto-bans. Flagged submissions queue for human review; you'll get an email + a chance to respond before any leaderboard removal.
• No CAPTCHA gating mid-puzzle.
• No mid-game ads.

Reporting

Email [email protected] with the leaderboard / date / username and we'll look into it within a week.