WWTBAM Bored

LinkedIn says it’s adding a variety of games aimed at making actual connections. The Microsoft-owned platform, best known for professional networking and sharing news, is taking a page from the New York Times and adding three, free “thinking-oriented” games as a way to tap into the explosive popularity of brain-busting puzzles people are adding to their daily routine. However, LinkedIn is adding its own twist to the games: Results are designed to be shared with co-workers, college alumni and associates at rival companies in an attempt to create camaraderie among your network and perhaps spark conversations and new connections.

Rolling out to users globally Wednesday are three games designed to be solved in under five minutes and are refreshed daily. Users will see a new games module in the “LinkedIn News” box in the upper right on the desktop website and in the “My Network” tab in the app. The first game is “Pinpoint,” a simple word association game that reveals a different word each time for a total of five tries with the player guessing the common category. The second puzzle is a time-based logic game called “Queens,” with the goal to add a crown emoji in every row, column and color-coded region on the board without the emojis touching each other. The third is a trivia game called “Crossclimb,” which LinkedIn describes as a “combination of a crossword and a word ladder,” where players use your own trivia prowess and word library to fill out the words arranged in a ladder. As the player guesses a word, they rearrange them so that each word in the ladder differs by only one letter, which then reveals the final clue to win “Crossclimb.”