About
Plankle is a daily logic puzzle about a woodworking line. One new puzzle appears each day, everybody gets the same one, and it takes a couple of minutes to play.
A square plank goes in one end of the line. It passes through five machines, one after another, and comes out the other end looking like the target you are shown. Your job is to work out which five machines did it, and in what order.
You have five tries. You never get to test a line before you run it — working it out in your head is the game.
Run a line and each of your five picks comes back coloured, in the way Wordle marks letters:
You also see the plank your guess actually produced, next to the target. Often that picture tells you more than the colours do: if your plank is the target rotated a quarter turn, you know roughly what you got wrong.
The machines fall into two groups, and the whole puzzle rests on the difference.
Some machines move the plank — they turn it, flip it, or push it along. Others work on a fixed spot: the drill is bolted down over the top-left square and will always drill there, whatever plank arrives underneath it.
So drilling and then turning the plank gives you something different from turning it first and drilling after. Swap two machines in your line and you usually get a different plank out. That is what makes the green and amber marks worth anything: position is real information, not decoration.
A few smaller rules add to it. Drilling a hole clears any paint that was there. A saw cannot cut through a hole. The cleaner strips paint and cuts off the top row but leaves holes alone, because you cannot put wood back.
Six of these ten turn up in any given puzzle, and which six changes daily.
This is the part that took the most care. With six machines and five slots there are 7,776 possible lines. Before a puzzle is ever shown to anybody, every one of those 7,776 is run and the results compared. A puzzle is only used if exactly one of them produces the target.
That guarantee is what makes the colours honest. You can never build a line that matches the target on screen and still be told it is wrong, and you can never be beaten by a puzzle that had two right answers and only accepted one of them. Puzzles that would be dull are thrown out too — lines using only one or two different machines, lines with no movement in them, four turntables in a row.
Is there a new puzzle every day? Yes, at local midnight. Everyone playing on the same date gets the same puzzle.
Do I need an account? No. There is nothing to sign up for. Your streak and your record live in your own browser.
Can I play more than one a day? No. There is one puzzle a day, and once you have finished it you are done until midnight. The result screen counts down to the next one.
Will I lose my streak if I clear my browser data? Yes, unfortunately. Everything is stored locally, so clearing site data or playing in a private window starts you from nothing.
Is it the same on my phone and my laptop? The puzzle is, but your record is not — it is kept per browser, so the two do not add up.