A free Murdle alternative — Deduce

Looking for a game like Murdle? Deduce is a free daily logic-deduction detective game where you solve a murder using clues about suspects, locations, weapons and, at higher ranks, additional deduction dimensions. It is free, it runs in the browser, there is a new case every day, and every past case stays playable.

Play today's Deduce

What Murdle is

Murdle is a daily murder-mystery logic puzzle created by G. T. Karber and published at murdle.com since 2022. You are given suspects, weapons, locations and sometimes motives, followed by a list of clues, and you work out the answer on a deduction grid. Its puzzles get harder as the week goes on, and it has spawned a successful series of books. It is deservedly the best-known game of its kind, and Deduce exists because of it rather than in spite of it.

What Deduce is

Deduce is a free daily logic-grid detective puzzle in the same tradition. A case opens each day at midnight UTC with a victim, a set of suspects, a set of rooms and a set of weapons. You read the clues, rule out the impossible on the grid, and file one accusation naming the killer, the room and the weapon. A wrongful arrest ends your streak.

What is the same

What is different

Cases are generated and machine-verified, not hand-written

Every Deduce case is produced by a generator and then checked by a constraint solver that works the case the way a player would. A case is only published if the solver confirms the whole grid resolves to exactly one arrangement by deduction alone. Candidates that fail are discarded, not softened. This is described in full on how Deduce puzzles are generated and verified.

Difficulty is a ladder you climb, not a weekly cycle

Murdle's puzzles get harder across the week and reset. Deduce has five permanent detective ranks — Rookie Detective, Junior Investigator, Inspector, Master Detective and Grand Sleuth — that you unlock by solving cases: Inspector at ten solves, Master Detective at twenty, Grand Sleuth at forty. Your rank persists, so the difficulty you face is the difficulty you have earned.

Higher ranks add new kinds of reasoning, not just more clues

A Rookie case is six to eight direct statements of fact. An Inspector case allows inference chains three deep and introduces witness statements. A Master Detective case runs up to thirteen clues with chains five deep, adds motives, and includes contradictory clues — meaning one of your witnesses is lying and part of the work is establishing which. A Grand Sleuth case runs to twenty clues on a five-by-five board and adds a fifth deduction axis: the time each suspect arrived.

Every past case stays playable

Deduce keeps a public archive of every case that has closed, browsable by date, rank and setting, and permanently playable. Solutions are never published there.

Cases run in several settings

Deduce cases are set in one of several fully written worlds — an English country house, 1940s Hollywood, a deep-space station and an 1880s silver-boom frontier town — each with its own cast, rooms and implements.

Deduce and Murdle side by side

Only facts that can be checked appear below. Where Murdle does not publish something, this table says so rather than guessing — several of the differences above are about how Deduce is built, which is not a thing any puzzle is obliged to document.

FeatureDeduceMurdle
Daily puzzleYesYes
Logic-grid deductionYesYes
Free to play in a browserYesYes
Murder-mystery / detective themeYesYes
Playable without an accountYesYes
Difficulty variesYes — five permanent ranks, unlocked by solvingYes — puzzles get harder through the week
Named detective ranks with progressionYes — fiveNot a published feature
Cases generated and solver-verifiedYes — every caseHand-written by its author; no verification process is published
Extra deduction axis beyond suspect / room / weaponYes — arrival time, at Grand SleuthMotives feature in some puzzles
Printed booksNoYes

Why try Deduce if you like Murdle

If you have finished today's Murdle and want another case, Deduce is a second daily puzzle in the same idiom that costs nothing. If you have been playing a while and want something harder, the rank ladder keeps escalating well past the point most daily puzzles stop — the Grand Sleuth board adds a whole extra dimension. And if you have ever abandoned a logic puzzle suspecting it needed a guess, the verification step exists precisely so that cannot happen here.

Play today's Deduce · Browse the archive · Read the FAQ