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Five cases a day, provably fair

How the daily cases are made, and why every detective on Earth gets the same ones.

Every midnight UTC, Kludoku publishes five new cases — Beginner to Expert — and every player in the world gets exactly the same five. That sentence hides the two hardest engineering promises in the game: the cases must be fresh every day without a human writing them, and they must be fair — solvable by pure logic, with exactly one answer, no guessing required, ever.

Seeded, not random

Each daily case is grown from a seed derived from the date. The generator is deterministic: give it the same seed and it rebuilds the identical case, down to the last testimony. That is why your friend in Singapore and your aunt in Ohio argue about the same liar over breakfast — there is no per-player variation to hide behind, and the leaderboards mean something because everyone ran the same gauntlet.

The uniqueness proof

Generating a murder mystery is easy; generating a fair one is the job. After the scene, the cast and the true positions are laid out, the generator produces a pool of true statements, then greedily selects a clue set — and then the important part happens: a solver exhaustively checks that the selected clues admit exactly one arrangement of suspects. Not "probably one". One. If a second valid arrangement exists, the case is rejected and rebuilt.

It gets harder on the boards that hide an accomplice. On those, one suspect's entire testimony is false, and the player is not told who. Fairness there means the solver must check every "who is the liar?" hypothesis: across all of them, exactly one consistent reading of the evidence may survive. A liar case where two different liar-theories both work is not a hard puzzle — it is a broken one, and the generator throws it away.

The ladder

The five difficulties are not just bigger grids. Beginner tells you nearly directly where someone stood; Expert tells you where somebody was not, three times, and expects you to do the rest. Medium is where pencil marks start paying rent. Hard is where lies become likely and motives may need proving. Expert stacks all of it — half of those boards carry a lying accomplice, and some demand you prove why as well as who. The intended experience is a ladder you climb over weeks, not a wall you hit on day one.

Why we bother

Because guessing is poison in a deduction game. The moment a player suspects a case cannot be reasoned to the end, hints stop feeling like tools and start feeling like tolls. Every Kludoku case ships with a machine-checked certificate that reason alone is enough — that is the whole contract, and the generator enforces it before a single human sees the board.

How to play · The liar cases, explained · The case calendar

Published · More from the devlog

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