Daily Brains · one article, a handful of planted mistakes, three red pencils.
Proofread is the word puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). You are the night proofreader on a small local paper, and every day one short article (70–180 words) arrives with mistakes planted in it. Tap each wrong word before it goes to print. The counter tells you how many errors are left, but not where they are, and every word you tap that was actually fine costs one of your three red pencils. Everyone gets the same article on the same day.
STORY & LORE
The newsroom
The paper covers village news, nature, science explainers, recipes, letters, notices, reviews and sport, all written for the game and all family-friendly. None of the people or places are real. The facts in the explainers were checked, because one of the planted errors is always a fact the article itself contradicts.
The weekly ramp
Monday's proof has three plain typos or doubled words. As the week goes on, the paper gets more errors and they get harder: homophones, wrong words, agreement and apostrophe slips, then subtle grammar and the fact slip. Saturday and Sunday also slip in red herrings, words that look odd but are perfectly correct.
HOW IT PLAYS
Marking the proof
Tap (or arrow to and press Enter on) a word you think is wrong. If it is a planted error, it gets a red circle with the correction written above it. If it was fine, it gets a grey STET ("let it stand") and you lose a pencil. Every error is exactly one word. Doubled words are marked on the extra copy. Lose all three pencils and the page is spiked. Send to print ends the day early, after a confirm tap.
Kinds of error
Typos and doubled words are easy. Homophones (there/their, peace/piece), wrong words (lose/loose), agreement (the bees gathers) and apostrophes (wing's for wings) are medium. Subtle grammar (fewer/less, comparatives, adverbs) and the fact slip, where a number or detail disagrees with something stated earlier in the same article, are hard.
Passing and scoring
You pass, and keep your streak, by finding at least N − ⌊N/4⌋ of the N errors before the pencils run out. Score = 600 × (fraction found) + 100 per pencil left × (fraction found), plus a speed bonus of up to 100 if you find every error. The bonus is full at or under the day's par time and fades to zero at three times par. The maximum is 1,000.
After the deadline
The results page shows the corrected article as a marked-up proof. Errors you found are circled in red, missed ones are shown in blue, your stets are dotted, and weekend red herrings are underlined in green. Each error gets a one-line explanation. The share line looks like: 🖍️ Proofread #25 · 7/8 found · 2 lives left.
Content
The book holds 370 articles, each with 8–16 candidate errors. Each day picks its errors from that pool according to the weekday quotas, and the rest are silently corrected. Articles are scheduled in a seeded shuffle, so no article repeats within a year of launch (#25–#389). Answers are obfuscated in the source and only reach the page once they are earned.
DAYS OF THE WEEK
| Day | Label | Errors | Pass mark | Par | Red herrings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Gentle | 3 (easy only) | 3 | 1:30 | No |
| Tuesday | Easy | 4 | 3 | 2:00 | No |
| Wednesday | Steady | 5 | 4 | 2:30 | No |
| Thursday | Tricky | 5 (incl. 1 hard) | 4 | 3:00 | No |
| Friday | Sharp | 6 (incl. 1 hard) | 5 | 3:30 | No |
| Saturday | Devious | 7 (incl. 2 hard) | 6 | 4:00 | Yes |
| Sunday | Fiendish | 8 (incl. 2 hard) | 6 | 5:00 | Yes |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Pass the proof | 15 Tickets |
| Find every error without a stet (perfect) | +25 Tickets |
| First Edition (first pass) | 📰 Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Clean Copy (perfect proof) | 🖍️ Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Three Editions (3-day streak) | 🔥 Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Weekly Deadline (7-day streak) | 📅 Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Chief Sub-Editor (30-day streak) | 👑 Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch version with the Daily Brains section.
- 370 original articles with 5,395 planted errors across eight kinds, weekday difficulty ramp, weekend red herrings.
- Three pencils, pass mark, speed bonus, marked-up results proof with an explanation for every error.
- Streaks, statistics sheet, share line and cloud-mirrored progress.