Zip
Route-drawing logic
Draw one line through every cell, meeting the numbered dots in order. It rewards spatial planning and an eye for forced moves.
LinkedIn Games · strategy guide
LinkedIn Zip: how to solve the daily puzzle, and solve it faster
LinkedIn Zip is one of the daily puzzles in LinkedIn Games. You get a small grid with a few numbered cells, and you draw one line that passes through the numbers in order and covers every square. This guide has the rules, five tactics that take time off your solve, the mistakes that cost the most seconds, and a seven-question quiz on how you read a board.
Test your Zip instincts
Question 1 of 7
A new Zip board loads: a 6x6 grid with eight numbered cells. What deserves your attention first?
What is LinkedIn Zip?
LinkedIn Zip is a path-drawing logic puzzle that LinkedIn publishes once a day in its Games section. LinkedIn Games opened in May 2024 with Queens, Pinpoint and Crossclimb, and Zip arrived in March 2025. A board is a small grid, often about 6x6, holding a few numbered dots and sometimes walls between cells. You solve it by drawing a single line that starts at 1, reaches each number in turn and passes through every cell once. The line moves up, down, left or right. It never moves diagonally, never passes through a wall and never crosses itself. A typical solve takes one to three minutes. Any LinkedIn member can play at no charge, in a desktop browser or in the mobile app.
Rules
The rules of LinkedIn Zip
- Grid. A small square board with a few cells marked 1, 2, 3 and so on. Your line begins on 1 and finishes on the largest number. Board size changes from day to day.
- Movement. You extend the line one cell at a time, sideways or up and down. Diagonal steps are not allowed.
- Sequence. The numbers must be reached in counting order. You cannot touch 3 before you have passed through 2.
- Full cover. By the end, the line has entered every cell once. A cell left empty, or a cell entered twice, means the board is not solved.
- Walls. Some boards have thick lines between neighboring cells. The line cannot pass through them, so a walled cell has fewer ways in and out than it first appears to.
- Controls. Undo takes back your last move, Clear empties the grid, and Hint removes the line back to your first mistake and shows the next correct step.
- Finishing. The puzzle ends when one line satisfies all of the above. LinkedIn times the solve, lets you share the result and keeps count of how many days in a row you have played.
Why it exists
Why a professional network publishes a puzzle
A puzzle that takes a minute or two and changes every day gives people a reason to open an app each morning. Wordle showed how strong that pull can be, and the New York Times has built a whole Games app on daily puzzles. LinkedIn Games applies the idea to a professional network: a small, satisfying task, a streak to protect and a result to compare with colleagues.
That purpose explains the design. Boards are small, so one fits into a coffee break. There is a single board per day, so there is nothing to binge. Results can be shared, so the puzzle turns into something people who work together talk about. Queens, Pinpoint, Crossclimb, Tango and Zip all follow that pattern.
Tactics
Five tactics for solving Zip faster
They are listed in the order you would use them on a board: read, deduce, plan, draw, check. None of them needs special knowledge. They only ask you to look before you drag.
- 1
Read the tightest numbered cell first
Your line has to begin at 1. Your thinking does not. Look over every numbered cell and count its open sides, treating walls and the edge of the board as closed. The cell with the fewest exits is the one you understand best, because the line can pass through it in only one or two ways. Fix that piece of the route in your head, and the cells next to it become easier to read in turn.
- 2
Find the moves that have no alternative
A cell with two open sides can be crossed only one way: in through one and out through the other, unless it holds the first or last number. A cell with a single open side has to be where the line begins or ends. Corners and walled-in cells produce most of these. Trace them in your mind before you touch the board. On many boards a good share of the route is settled this way, with no guessing at all.
- 3
Think in regions and doorways
Walls, together with the stretches you have already fixed, divide the board into regions joined by narrow gaps. Decide the order in which the line visits those regions and which gap it uses each time. A gap one cell wide can be crossed once, so a region behind it must be completely filled before the line leaves. When the order of regions is clear, filling each one is usually a simple sweep back and forth.
- 4
Step back as soon as something is cut off
The moment a group of empty cells can no longer be reached, or a number is sealed away from the line, stop drawing. Nothing you add will rescue it. Take back one segment at a time until the trapped area opens again. That costs a few seconds and shows you exactly which turn was wrong. A full restart throws that lesson away.
- 5
Count cells before you commit
A quick count catches a bad plan early. On a board of N cells the line makes N minus 1 moves, so each stretch between two consecutive numbers has to absorb its share of the empty cells. If your plan takes the short way from 2 to 3 and leaves a block that nothing returns for, the plan is wrong. Checkerboard coloring helps as well. Every move switches color, so the count of moves between two numbers is odd when they sit on different colors and even when they share one. Last, look at where the final number sits. It is often tucked into a corner or a walled pocket, which tells you the side the line must arrive from.
What costs time
Five mistakes that slow a Zip solve
Dragging before looking
Fifteen seconds spent reading the board is cheaper than a minute spent drawing and erasing. The opening stretch of the line shapes everything that comes after it.
Treating corners as leftovers
A corner has two exits at most, so the line can pass through it only one way. Settle the corners early and use them as fixed points.
Overlooking a wall
Walls are thin and easy to miss on a phone screen. Scan for them before you plan, because each one takes an exit away from two cells.
Reasoning strictly from 1 upward
The line must meet the numbers in order. Your reasoning need not. The position of the last number and the tight spots near the end often decide what the middle of the route has to look like.
Wiping the board at the first problem
Starting over feels decisive and usually repeats the same error. Take back a few segments instead. The fix tends to be close by.
Keep count
A private Zip streak tracker
Record each day's solve here and a streak builds up beside your fastest time. The record lives in this browser and nowhere else. It is not sent to a server and has no link to your LinkedIn account, so clearing your browser data clears it too.
Streak tracker
Kept in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Current run0days
Longest run0days
Fastest solve—time
The other daily puzzles
How Zip compares with Queens, Pinpoint, Crossclimb and Tango
Zip shares the Games tab with four other well-known dailies. Each takes a few minutes and refreshes once a day, and each tests something different. If Zip suits you, the two grid puzzles, Queens and Tango, are its closest relatives.
Queens
Placement logic
Put one queen in every row, column and colored region, with no two queens touching, even at a corner. It feels nearer to Sudoku than to Zip.
Pinpoint
Guess the category
Up to five clue words appear one by one, and all of them belong to one category. Name it using as few clues as you can. This one is about word association.
Crossclimb
Trivia word ladder
Answer clues to fill a stack of words, reorder them so each differs from the next by a single letter, then solve the top and bottom rungs. Vocabulary counts as much as logic.
Tango
Sun-and-moon grid logic
Fill a 6x6 grid with suns and moons so every row and column holds three of each, and no more than two identical symbols sit side by side.
Practice
A one-week plan to get faster at Zip
On days one and two, ignore the clock. Before you draw anything, point to every cell that can be crossed only one way and say where the line has to start and end. On days three and four, add the region step: decide the order of regions and the gap you will use between each pair, then draw. From day five, time yourself and log the result in the tracker above. Most of the improvement comes from the reading you do before the first drag, so a slower start usually produces a faster finish.
If Zip is what brought you to LinkedIn today, three other free pages on this site are for the rest of the visit. The LinkedIn profile review scores your profile section by section. The guide to creating a LinkedIn profile drafts one from a few sentences about you. And the LinkedIn Premium explainer sets out what the paid plans add, which does not include Zip. The puzzle is free.
Questions
LinkedIn Zip FAQ
What is LinkedIn Zip?
Zip is a daily logic puzzle in LinkedIn Games. On a small grid you draw one unbroken line that reaches the numbered cells in order and passes through every cell once.
Is LinkedIn Zip free to play?
Yes. Any LinkedIn member can play at no cost. No Premium, Sales Navigator or Recruiter subscription is involved.
Is LinkedIn Premium required for Zip?
No. LinkedIn Games is open to all members, so a free account is enough.
What time does a new Zip puzzle come out?
LinkedIn releases one new puzzle per game each day at midnight Pacific Time. That is early morning in the eastern United States and breakfast time in much of Europe.
Can I replay yesterday's Zip puzzle?
Not inside LinkedIn. When the new board is released, the previous one expires and can no longer be played.
How do I see my past Zip results?
After you finish a board, LinkedIn shows your time, your streak and some statistics, and gives you a result to share. It does not offer a full list of every past time. The streak tracker on this page keeps your own record in your browser, with solve times if you enter them.
Which other puzzles are in LinkedIn Games?
Queens, Pinpoint, Crossclimb and Tango are the best known, and LinkedIn has added more since. All of them are short puzzles that reset daily.
How can I solve Zip faster?
Read the board before you draw. Begin with the numbered cell that has the fewest open sides, settle every cell that can be crossed only one way, and decide the order in which the line visits each region. Then draw, and take back one segment at a time if an area gets cut off.
Does LinkedIn Zip have hints?
Yes. The Hint button removes your line back to the first mistake and shows the next correct step. There are also Undo and Clear buttons. Solving without the hint is the better practice if you want your times to improve.
Can the line in Zip move diagonally or cross itself?
No. The line moves only up, down, left or right, enters each cell once, and cannot pass through a wall. If it would have to cross itself to reach a cell, the route so far is wrong.
Will LinkedIn add more games like Zip?
LinkedIn has kept adding to Games since the 2024 launch, so more daily puzzles are likely. New ones appear in the LinkedIn Games hub.
Today
Today's board is waiting.
Play it, log your time in the tracker and come back tomorrow. This guide is published by Icebreakly, which helps you become a familiar name to your LinkedIn leads by commenting on their posts in your voice.