Microsoft's LinkedIn officially launches its free puzzle games to help connect people

In March, Microsoft's LinkedIn subsidiary confirmed that the business and job placement social network was going to be adding some puzzle games for its members to play. Today, LinkedIn launched its first three games. They are available to access on the web for PC and mobile users.

In a blog post, Lakshman Somasundaram, LinkedIn's Director of Product Management, revealed why a business and job social network wanted to develop and release games:

Games are all about connection for us. LinkedIn’s mission has always been to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. And, as the world of work has shifted in the last 20 years since LinkedIn’s founding, so has the way people connect with each other.

LinkedIn is launching three games today: Pinpoint, Queens, and Crossclimb. Here's a brief description of each game:

Pinpoint is our word association game — there’s five words inside a grid, and your objective is to guess (or pinpoint, dare I say!) what common category all the words belong to. But there’s a twist: the five words are hidden, and only one is revealed at a time. You want to guess the category in as few reveals as possible.

Queens is our logic game. The goal here is to fill the grid with queens (👑) such that there is one — and only one — queen in every row, column, and region…with no queens touching each other. There’s only one right answer, and it’s always possible to solve without guessing. And, of course, it’s a race against the clock!

Crossclimb is our trivia game. Think of it as a combination of a crossword and a word ladder: you use a mix of your trivia and word knowledge to fill out the words in the ladder. As you fill in words, you’ll rearrange them such that each word in the ladder differs by only one letter — which unlocks two final clues to win the game.

Each of the three LinkedIn games are designed so they can be played once per day and each game only takes a few minutes to play.

Players can not only see how their scores in the game compared to other LinkedIn connections and there will also be support for both school and company leaderboards. All three games are now available on the LinkedIn Games site. You can also access them on the LinkedIn News section for PC users, and also on LinkedIn's My Network tab on PC and mobile.