LinkedIn Pinpoint: Rules, Scoring and Answer Patterns

Pinpoint is the word-association game on LinkedIn. You are shown clues one at a time, and your job is to name the category they share. This guide covers where the game came from, how a round works, what LinkedIn says about scores and sharing, and what 112 past puzzles show about the kinds of answers to expect. For help reading individual clues, see the companion guide on Pinpoint hints. This site is not affiliated with LinkedIn.

Where Pinpoint came from

Pinpoint launched on May 1, 2024, together with Queens and Crossclimb, as the first LinkedIn games. TechCrunch said the LinkedIn News team conceived and built them, and that it had reported in March 2024 that LinkedIn was quietly testing games. LinkedIn’s launch post described Pinpoint in one line: “a word association game where you try to guess the common category for a set of clues.” The whole story of the eight games is in the LinkedIn games guide.

Early coverage compared it to a New York Times puzzle. The TechCrunch writer said Pinpoint “seemed so similar to Connections” that they kept calling it that during the interview, and The Verge’s review called it “basically The New York Times’ Connections game but in reverse”: the game gives you items and you guess the category.

One detail from launch day did not last. The Verge’s first report said the words “will reveal themselves on a timer”. LinkedIn’s current Help Center says the next clue appears after a wrong guess, and this guide follows the Help Center.

The rules as LinkedIn states them

The Help Center’s Pinpoint page describes a round in these steps:

Go to the game page and click or tap Start game. The first clue is revealed.
Type your guess in the “Guess the category” box and press Enter or tap Guess.
If the guess is wrong, the next clue is revealed. Repeat.
You aim to find the category with as few clue reveals as possible.
If you use up all the reveals without guessing the category, you lose, and the answer is shown. If you guess it, you win, and the answer is shown.

There are five clues in total. A new puzzle comes out every day at midnight Pacific Time, and the previous one expires then and is no longer playable. For the same moment in your own time zone, see when LinkedIn games reset.

A round, clue by clue: Pinpoint #913

Here is one finished puzzle, Pinpoint #913 from October 30, 2026, played the way the rules describe. The clues, in the order recorded, are Wings, House, Pit, Green room and “Stage (where the action is)”. The category is “Parts of a theatre”.

After “Wings” you have almost nothing. Wings belong to birds, planes and buildings, so a first guess here would be a coin toss.
“House” and “Pit” keep every reading open. A house can be a building or a family, and a pit can be a hole or the stone in a fruit.
“Green room” is the first clue that points somewhere. It is the backstage room where performers wait.
The fifth clue carries a short note in brackets, “where the action is”, and “Stage” fits a performance space. Now “Parts of a theatre” fits all five.

A player who guessed right after clue 4 would have seen four clues. A player who waited for the fifth would have seen all five. That is the trade-off the game is built around: the Help Center says to aim for “as few clue reveals as possible”, and a wrong guess opens the next clue anyway.

Three more finished rounds

The same clue-by-clue reading works on other shapes. These puzzles are finished, and the clues are in the order recorded.

A “Parts of” round: #916, November 2. Body, Greeting, Address, Signature, “P.S. (after the main text)”. “Body” alone could be anything, even a human body. “Greeting” and “Address” start to describe a message, “Signature” closes the gap, and the note on the last clue names the postscript. The category is “Parts of written correspondence (letter or email)”. With this shape, the clues are usually things you would find together in one place.

A “Types of” round: #917, November 3. Taiga, Tundra, Savanna, Desert, Rainforest, and no bracketed note on the last clue. Here each clue is specific from the start. Someone who knows the vocabulary sees “regions with their own climate” after two clues, and the work is finding the group name: “Types of biome”. When every clue is a precise term, the difficulty moves from finding the idea to finding the word for it.

A “Things with” round: #914, October 31. Books, Cacti, Sea urchins, “Vertebrates (by definition)”, “Porcupines (they’re sharp!)”. The objects have nothing in common except one part, and each means something different by it: the spine of a book, the spines of a cactus or an urchin, the spine that makes a vertebrate a vertebrate, a porcupine’s quills. The category is “Things with spines”. These puzzles are about a property that unrelated things share, so ask what each clue has, not what each clue is.

Scoring and the streak

The Help Center names the goal, the fewest reveals, but does not publish a scoring formula, and its Pinpoint page does not mention time. After a game, the results page shows your score compared with averages for all members, your company, CEOs and others.

Pinpoint also feeds your streak. LinkedIn’s streaks page says the streak counts consecutive days you have won a game, so a Pinpoint where you use all five clues without the right category is a loss. A streak freeze, earned after five wins in a row, covers a day you miss; how freezes and restoring a long streak work is in the LinkedIn games guide.

When you finish a round, the Help Center says LinkedIn sends you to a results page. There you can:

see your score compared with averages for all members, your company, CEOs and more;
check your streak and game analytics, and set a reminder for the next puzzle;
open the leaderboard, if you are eligible, to see whether your company or school is ranked;
share your score or leaderboard position with connections;
find the games you have not played yet today.

According to the Help Center’s score-sharing page, after you finish you can post your score to LinkedIn, send it to connections by message, or copy it and paste it into another app. The games overview lists the ways to compare: a leaderboard of your connections, and a company and school leaderboard that ranks the top 50 by average score. You choose whether connections see only that you played, or also your score, under “Who can see your gaming activity?” in the game’s settings. LinkedIn’s Queens and Crossclimb Help pages also list daily posts where members who played that day talk about it. The full list of interaction features is in the LinkedIn games guide.

What 112 past answers look like

To see what kinds of categories turn up, we counted the answers in a public record of the daily puzzles, the linkedin-games-archive on GitHub. It covers July 17 to November 6, 2026: 112 puzzles, which are #808 to #920 on puzzle numbers, with July 18 (#809) missing from the record. For #909 to #920 we checked it against this site’s own database, and the clues and answers agree apart from punctuation. It is a third-party record, so treat the counts as counts of what it lists.

Five clues in every one of the 112 puzzles, and the first clue is a single word in 98 of them.

Shape of the answer	Puzzles	Example
A missing word: “Words that come before or after …”	29	Words that come before “stream” (#912)
“Things …” (that rise, with spines, shaped like triangles)	27	Things with spines (#914)
“Types of …”	11	Types of wine (#910)
“Parts of …”	6	Parts of a fireplace (#911)
“Different meanings, definitions or ways …”	6	Different meanings of “bug” (Jul 25)
“Famous …” or “Fictional …”	4	Fictional sea captains (#918)
Other lists (brands, rivers, ranks, films)	29	Metal alloys (#909)

Three patterns stand out.

Missing-word puzzles cluster late in the week. Of the 29, only 2 fell on a Monday to Wednesday (one Tuesday, one Wednesday, none on a Monday). The other 27 fell from Thursday to Sunday: 7 on Thursdays, 7 on Fridays, 7 on Saturdays and 6 on Sundays. Each weekday had 15 to 17 puzzles in the record. Fifteen of the 29 put the missing word after the clues and 14 before them, and the missing word “drop” came up three times (after the clues twice and before them once). These are counts from about 16 weeks, not a rule LinkedIn has stated.

Fifth-clue notes became common. Sometimes the last clue carries a short note in brackets, like “Carbon (the second c of cc)” in #915. In the record, 44 of the 112 fifth clues have one. The share rose month by month:

Month	Fifth clues with a bracketed note	Puzzles
July (from the 17th)	2	14
August	7	31
September	12	30
October	19	31
November (1st to 6th)	4	6

A fragment in the last slot often points to a missing word. In the missing-word puzzles the later clues are often half a phrase: “Whatever floats your” on a “boat” puzzle, “Name your” on a “price” puzzle, “Drag-and-” on a “drop” puzzle. When a clue reads like a sentence that stopped early, try the word that finishes it.

Reading the clues

The practical advice is in the hints guide. The short version, drawn from the counts above:

Do not commit on clue 1. Most puzzles (98 of the 112) open with a single word that fits many categories.
Name what the clues share, then make it narrower. “Metals” fits #909 after three clues, but the category is “Metal alloys”.
On Thursday through Sunday, give a missing word more weight than on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.
Read a bracketed note on the last clue as the strongest nudge you will get.

Quick answers

Is there a prize? No. LinkedIn says there are no prizes for solving its games.

Can I play yesterday’s puzzle? Not on LinkedIn. The previous puzzle expires at midnight Pacific Time. Past Pinpoint puzzles are in the archive here, with their clues, hints and answers.

Do I need an account? No. Guest mode lets you play without one, but your score is kept for 30 minutes and no streak is saved (guest mode).

How many clues are there? Five. In the 112 puzzles counted above, every one had five.

Using this site with Pinpoint

You cannot play Pinpoint here. Each puzzle page shows the five clues, a hint button and a separate answer button. Both stay covered until you tap them, and scrolling never opens either one. The hint is one sentence and does not name the answer. Open it first, and keep the answer closed until you have tried again in LinkedIn.

Today’s puzzle is on the home page. Earlier puzzles, grouped by month and each with its own hint and answer, are in the Pinpoint archive. The page also asks how many clues you needed, and you can turn the result into a card to download or share. The pages and the checking behind them are described on the method page.

LinkedIn Pinpoint: rules, scoring and what the answers look like