Daily tactics. Nothing hidden.
Three wardens. Six rows of gears. A bell counting down. Clockwork: Gridlock is a daily tactics puzzle with nothing hidden and nothing random — every enemy shows you its next strike before you take your turn. There is no luck to blame and no dice to curse, only the question of what to do with what you can already see. Wordle's ritual, Into the Breach's brain.
Free daily · No ads · Plays in a minute · iPhone · iPad · 10 languages
THE BOARD
THE TRICK
You never have to out-damage anything. Shove a foe one tile and its hammer falls on empty gears. Hook it into line with its own ally and it does your work for you. Sweep it into a row the bell has already seized and the machine takes it. Damage is scarce on purpose — displacement is the arithmetic that closes.
Perfect information, zero luck
No fog, no dice, no timers, no mid-puzzle RNG. The bell counts rounds, not seconds — take as long as you like on any turn. Five Keywardens, each a different way to move something that doesn't want to move: punch, hook, thrust, sweep, chime.
Every board is machine-proven
An exhaustive solver verifies every puzzle before it ships — daily, tutorial, and campaign alike. When a board says par 3, a three-round solution provably exists. Not playtested. Proven. Undo is unlimited, and the Tip reads from the machine-proven line — no currency, no cooldown, no video to watch.
ONE BOARD A DAY
Three pressures, one puzzle
The daily arrives at midnight UTC, identical for everyone, in Easy, Medium, and Hard — the same board with the bell striking earlier or later. Each tier is scored and saved separately. Plays in a minute; the good days take longer.
The Winding
A streak with a 48-hour grace window, a 28-day calendar of kept and missed watches, a Monday-easy to Saturday-hard curve, and spoiler-free share cards for when you solve it clean.
FREE FOREVER · ONE PURCHASE
Free: the daily, the Doctrine, the watches
The daily puzzle in all three difficulties, the twelve-lesson Doctrine tutorial campaign, three authored watches, streaks, the calendar, and sharing — free forever, with no advertising.
Paid once: The Long Wind
The campaign — four acts, twenty-six boards, from the Gallery Floors down to the Vigil — is a single $2.99 non-consumable purchase with Family Sharing. No subscription, no currency, no consumables, and acts added in later updates are included.
BUILT LIKE A MACHINE
The whole game runs on a pure deterministic engine — the same seed produces the same board for every player on Earth, and a solved run is a ~50-character replay the server re-runs to validate. Anti-cheat by proof, not trust.
No ads, no third-party SDKs, no tracking, no account. The daily pool is bundled, so the Doctrine, the watches, and the campaign all play offline. See the privacy policy for the specifics.
SPECS
- Platform
- iPhone · iPad · browser
- Price
- Free · optional $2.99 campaign (once) · Family Sharing
- Genre
- Turn-based tactics puzzle · single-player
- Session
- Plays in a minute — no timers of any kind
- Languages
- EN · 日本語 · 한국어 · 简体中文 · Filipino · ES-419 · PT-BR · DE · FR · IT
- Connectivity
- Offline-capable — online only for the new daily + leaderboard
- Age rating
- 9+
- Telemetry
- None — no account, no tracking
- Coming next
- Android
The world is one vast machine, and it is running down. Keep the watch.