LinkedIn launches Mini Sudoku, pushing deeper into casual games that keep users coming back
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Three-time Sudoku champion Thomas Snyder and the Japanese publisher that popularized the puzzle are teaming up with one of the world's biggest social networks.
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cryptocurrency
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August 12, 2025
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CNBC
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In this articleMSFT your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNTNikoli's president, Yoshinao Anpuku, poses for a photo at Nikoli headquarters in Tokyo on March 19, 2025
LinkedIn worked with Nikoli and Sudoku champion Thomas Snyder to launch its Mini Sudoku game.NikoliLinkedIn on Tuesday released a new game for the fessional social networking app's 1.2 billion users
It's a miniature version of Sudoku, an old game with a rich history.The new Mini Sudoku is LinkedIn's sixth game
It's scaled down from the traditional 9-by-9 grid and meant to be in two or three minutes."We don't want to have a puzzle on LinkedIn that takes 20 minutes to solve, right?" said Lakshman Somasundaram, a senior director of duct at the Microsoft subsidiary, in an interview with CNBC. "We're not games for games' sake."The introduction has the potential to strike a nostalgic chord and spark competition with colleagues, friends and family members for how fast the puzzle can be solved.As with other puzzles in the app, Mini Sudoku gets harder as the days gress through the week.LinkedIn added games last year to increase the fun and give users something new to talk with one another.Millions of people play LinkedIn's games every day, a spokesperson said
The most time is 7 a.m
ET, and Gen Z is the top demographic
Of those who play today, 86% will return tomorrow, and 82% will be playing next week, the spokesperson said.Launched in 2003 and acquired by Microsoft for $27 billion in 2016, LinkedIn remains in growth mode
Revenue increased 9% to $4.6 billion in the quarter and membership reached 1.2 billion
Meta's social networks are more , with a combined 3.5 billion daily users and 22% revenue growth.Un Meta, LinkedIn gives recruiters tools for finding candidates, and job seekers can apply for openings listed on the site
LinkedIn also now motes a personalized of s, similar to Google's YouTube, TikTok and Meta's own Facebook and Instagram.Read more CNBC newsWhat Trump's Nvidia and AMD China deal means for the worldTrump says he asked for 20% cut from Nvidia, calls H20 an 'obsolete' chipStubHub IPO is back on for September after ticketing company delayed plans on tariff concernsCrypto exchange Bullish raises IPO size, seeks nearly $5 billion valuationMaking the gameLinkedIn's development of the game resulted from an encounter with Japanese publisher Nikoli, which ized Sudoku.Somasundaram and a band of LinkedIn associate duct managers visited Nikoli's Tokyo headquarters late last year and spoke through a translator puzzles with the publisher's employees
That led to weeks of meetings involving LinkedIn, Nikoli and Thomas Snyder, a three-time World Sudoku Championship winner who has helped LinkedIn with its gaming strategy.The group hoped to make Sudoku more accessible, building several totypes before landing on the board with six rows and six of squares."It's very easy to just make a Sudoku grid," Snyder said. "It's very hard to make art in the form of Sudoku
And that's what both Nikoli and we do."Snyder is founder and CEO of Grandmaster Puzzles, a publisher of Sudoku books
With a Ph.D. in chemistry, he goes by the nickname Dr
Sudoku and has contributed to the hint feature in LinkedIn's Mini Sudoku and constructed some of the puzzles
With each day's puzzle, there will be a showing how Snyder solves it."I think it's got the potential to be the largest of the games, just because it's going to have a lot of brand awareness from moment one," he said.Sudoku's historyHoward Garns, an architect from Indiana, came up with a game called "Number Place" that required people to fill in a grid with numbers from one to nine
No number can be repeated in a row or column, and all nine numbers must appear just once in each of the nine 3-by-3 grids that make up the puzzle.Number Place debuted in the magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles & Word Games in 1979
It only took off after Nikoli included a spin on the puzzle in the October 1984 issue of Puzzle Communication Nikoli under the name "Suji wa dokushin ni kagiru," which means "The numbers must be single," a Nikoli spokesperson told CNBC in an .Readers abbreviated the puzzle's name, calling it Sudoku.At first, the publisher employed both the long name and the shorter Sudoku title in Puzzle Communication Nikoli
In 1992 Nikoli started using only the Sudoku name, the spokesperson said.U.S. and European newspapers began publishing Sudoku puzzles in the mid-2000s
Sudoku joined The New York Times' NYT Games app, which boasts 10 million daily users, in 2023
More than 100 media companies have licensed Nikoli's Sudoku puzzles, the spokesperson said."The daily puzzles will only be available on LinkedIn each day, but we are looking forward to republishing selected puzzles from those in our magazine," the spokesperson wrote.WATCH: AI will have an impact on the future of work, LinkedIn sayswatch now5:4805:48AI will have an impact on the future of work, LinkedIn saysCapital Connection
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