How to play Pinpoint — the free LinkedIn category-guessing game

Pinpoint takes the category-guessing puzzle that so many people now play with their morning coffee and keeps it deliberately simple. There is a new category every day, shared by everyone, so you can compare how quickly you cracked it with friends. When the daily puzzle is done, an unlimited practice mode serves up fresh five-clue rounds whenever you want more, so you are never left waiting until tomorrow.

Three things set the tone. First, it is free — there is no paywall and no premium upsell. Second, it asks for no account: your streak and statistics live in your own browser, so you can start the moment the page loads without handing over an email address. Third, the interface is quiet — type-set clue cards, a plain-text share you can paste anywhere, and zero emoji anywhere in the experience.

It is also built to be read by everyone. The clue list renders as real text before any script runs, every state is announced in words rather than colour alone, and the whole board is fully keyboard-operable. That means it works on a slow connection and stays legible for screen-reader users — the category read-out never depends on a colour you might not be able to see.

The day’s category is the same for every player and rolls over at midnight in your own time zone. Solve it and your streak ticks up; come back tomorrow to keep it alive. When you finish, you can copy a plain-text result line — how few clues you needed, without naming the category and spoiling it — and paste it to friends. Because there is no timer, nobody is pushed to rush; the game rewards a careful read of the clues over raw speed.

The goal is to name a hidden category from its members. Five clue words are shown one at a time, and every one of them belongs to that single category. You read the revealed clue, type the category the words share, and submit your guess — the sooner you can name it, the better your score.

The clues are ordered from vaguest to most obvious. Clue one is intentionally broad and could fit dozens of groups; each later clue narrows the field until clue five is nearly a giveaway. A wrong guess simply reveals the next clue, so there is no penalty beyond a softer score — guessing on fewer clues is the whole game. The table below shows how a round unfolds:

You control the pace with a small set of moves. Submitting a guess is the main one; if you would rather see more before committing, Reveal next clue turns over the following card without counting a miss against you, and Show answer ends the round and displays the category. A live read-out tracks which clue you are on and how many misses you have made, and when the round closes a result panel sums up how few clues you needed — the plain-text line you can copy and share.

A few more details are worth knowing. Because Pinpoint is trivia rather than logic, judging is forgiving: case, spacing and punctuation are ignored, and close wording or common synonyms are accepted, so you do not have to match the category label exactly. You win on a correct guess; the round ends after five wrong guesses. And because there is no timer, Pinpoint rewards a sharp read of the clues over speed — there is nothing to lose by pausing to think, and everything to gain from naming the link a clue early.

Suppose the hidden category is board games, and the five clue words arrive in this order. Read down the table and watch how the shared thread comes into focus:

On clue one, RISK could belong to almost anything — finance, danger, insurance. Guessing now would be a gamble. By clue three, though, RISK, SORRY and TROUBLE line up as three well-known games, and the shared thread — all of these are classic board games — is visible. Naming board games right there scores far better than waiting for MONOPOLY to hand it to you on clue five. And because judging is fuzzy, you do not have to be precise: “board game”, “board games” and “classic board games” all land the same way.

Notice what the ordering is doing for you. The puzzle deliberately leads with the words whose everyday meanings are the loudest — RISK and SORRY read as an abstract noun and an apology long before they read as games — and saves the unmistakable one, MONOPOLY, for last. That is the whole design: the earlier you can see past the surface meaning to the set underneath, the better you score. A cautious player who waits for clue five still wins the round, but at the softest score; the reward goes to the reader who trusts the pattern on clue three and commits.

Category games have quietly become their own genre. Some ask you to sort a grid of words into hidden groups; Pinpoint instead asks you to name a single group from clues that arrive one at a time. It is closest in spirit to LinkedIn’s Pinpoint, and we are happy to say so plainly: this is the same kind of puzzle, rebuilt as an independent version with our own original code. The table below lays out the practical differences against Connections, the best-known grid-sorting game.

The distinction that matters most is how the information arrives. In a grid game, everything is on the table at once and the challenge is untangling it. In Pinpoint, the clues are drip-fed from vaguest to most obvious, so the pressure is on timing: name the link early for a better score, or wait for a safer clue and settle for a softer one.