Playing against other people
How the shared-link competition works: one identical board, a countdown of one, three or five minutes, up to eight players, and a leaderboard that stays hidden until everyone has finished.
One board, one link
The Competition tab builds a board that is not the daily and not a practice board — it is seeded from a code that lives in a link. Everyone who opens that link gets the identical nine cells, so a competition is a like-for-like comparison rather than two people playing two different puzzles and comparing numbers.
Setting one up takes two decisions: how long each player gets, and how many players are taking part. The clock is one, three or five minutes; the roster is between 2 and 8 people. Then you copy the link and send it.
The rules are fixed, deliberately
A competition ignores your own preferences and runs everyone on one ruleset: the standard 12-guess limit, impossible mode off. Unlimited guesses would let one player brute-force the same board another player had to think through, and impossible mode would change what counts as a legal answer between two people who are supposedly playing the same game. Nothing about a competition should depend on a setting the other player cannot see.
Hints still work, and still cost 25 points. They are the one lever that trades score for time, which is exactly the decision a countdown is supposed to force.
The clock
The countdown starts when you start, not when the link was created, so nobody is disadvantaged by opening it late. When it runs out the board is banked wherever it stands — an unfinished board scores what it has filled, not zero. Finishing all nine cells early ends the turn there and then.
Refreshing mid-turn does not lose the game. The board and its progress are restored from the code in the link, which is also why a competition board is reproducible in the first place.
The leaderboard, and why it waits
Results stay hidden until the last player has finished. Seeing a target score before you play changes how you play it — it turns a puzzle into a chase, and it tells you roughly how deep the board goes, which is information the first player did not have. Everyone plays blind, then everyone sees everything at once.
When the last result lands, the leaderboard appears with every player's score, and the full answer key for all nine cells becomes available from there. Arguing about the board afterwards is most of the point.
What a competition does not do
Competitions never touch your lifetime statistics and never extend a streak, however well you do. They are one-off challenges against specific people on a board that exists for that purpose, and folding them into a daily record would make both numbers mean less. If you want the result on your record, play the daily.
There is also no account requirement on either side. A player who opens the link picks a display name and plays; nothing is created, nothing is stored beyond the competition, and signed-out players compete on exactly equal terms.