Game guide

How to Play Alibi

Alibi is a daily cozy-mystery logic puzzle. A death overnight, a household with statements — every word of them true, but only one arrangement of people and implements fits all of them at once. Read the rail, place each suspect and every piece of evidence back where they belong; once the last alibi locks in, the room with the killer and the weapon marks itself as the crime scene.

The case file

The setup

A small cast of suspects, a few pieces of evidence, a handful of rooms. Every suspect was in exactly one room at the time of death, with exactly one piece of evidence — and every clue you read is true. Place each suspect and every piece of evidence where it belongs.

Cases range from a friendly 2×3 on Monday up to a 3×4 on Sunday. You can play offline once the day's file has loaded; your in-room placements and locked chips survive a refresh.

Deduction

1. Read the clues

Tap a clue to pin it; hover previews it on desktop. The rooms, palette chips, and staged chips it talks about light up plum across the board so you can see what it's claiming at a glance. Vertical chips encode column relationships; ribbons encode row or togetherness relationships.

Left of. The two items share a row, with the first sitting strictly to the left of the second.
Above.The two items share a column, with the first sitting strictly above the second. Vertical chip — that shape alone tells you it's a column constraint.
Next to. The two items sit in rook-adjacent rooms — touching left/right or up/down, never diagonally.
Together.The two items share one room. Mint-tinted ‘+’ in the rail.
Apart.The two items are in different rooms — they will never share. Coral-tinted ‘✕’ in the rail.
Free moves

2. Stage your hypotheses

Draga palette chip into the room you suspect. Rooms accept as many chips as you like while you're working things out — pile suspects and evidence into rooms freely, drag them between rooms to rearrange, drag them back out of any room to remove them. None of this counts as a false accusation. Staging is free; only confirms cost you.

Drag a chip in to stage — rooms hold as many candidates as you like. Drag any chip back out (drop anywhere outside) to remove just that occurrence.
Lock it in

3. Confirm with a tap

When you're sure a staged chip belongs in its room, tap it. Correct: the chip locks (mint celebration tint, can't be dragged away) and the other chips of the same type you piled into that room clear out automatically. Wrong: only the tapped chip pops back to the palette, and the False accusations counter ticks up by one.

Each wrong tap costs one life. Staging is free, so stack chips across rooms freely — only spend a confirm when the clues actually point one way.

Tap the right chip — it locks into its mint celebration tint and the other same-type chips you piled in clear out automatically.
Win condition

4. Close the case

Confirm every suspect and every piece of evidence in its right room and the case is closed. The status bar runs from Locked 0/N up to N/N— once you're full you'll see the victory card.

The case file at the top of the rail names the victim; the rooms on the board carry the rest. When you close the case, the room where the killer and the weapon ended up gets flagged on the board as the crime scene, with the suspect chip marked Killer and the evidence chip marked Weapon — the three-part verdict you reconstructed from the statements.

Every Alibi has exactly one consistent arrangement, so any path that places every chip without contradicting a clue is the answer. A fresh case lands at midnight Eastern, sized for a morning coffee. Monday is an open-and-shut affair; the cases grow through the week to Sunday's locked-room mystery.