logical.day — A daily logic puzzle

The Setup

A row of five houses

Each house on Maple Lane is painted a different color. In each house lives a person of different occupation, who keeps a different pet, prefers a different drink, and reads books on a different evening. Use the clues to determine who reads which evening—and which evening is read by no one at all.

1The teacher lives in the yellow house.
2The cat lives next door to the person who reads on Tuesday.
3Coffee is drunk in the green house, which is immediately right of the white house.
4The architect reads on Monday and keeps no pets at all.
5The owner of the terracotta house is a baker.
6The dog lives two doors from the tea drinker.
7The middle house drinks milk; the leftmost house drinks cocoa.
8No one reads on Sunday; the gardener reads on Friday.

Hints, in order

Open one if you’re stuck

☉ Hint 1 · Where to begin

Start with clue 7. The middle house drinks milk and the leftmost drinks cocoa—these are absolute positions. Pin them down first; everything pivots on the middle.

☉ Hint 2 · A useful pair

Combine clues 1 and 5. The teacher (yellow) and baker (terracotta) cannot be the same person, so two of the five houses are now color-pinned by occupation.

☉ Hint 3 · The narrowing

By clue 3, green is to the immediate right of white. With cocoa on the left and milk in the middle, only positions 4–5 (or 3–4 in some readings) accept the white–green pair. Try each and watch one collapse.

☉ Hint 4 · The contradiction

Once positions are fixed, clue 8 leaves only one open evening. The reader who never reads on Wednesday is the one whose evening was forced elsewhere. Look for the architect.

Step-by-step reasoning

If you’d like to walk through it

i.
Anchor the absolutes. Clue 7 fixes milk at house 3 and cocoa at house 1.
ii.
Place the white–green adjacency. Coffee in green (clue 3) cannot be house 3 (milk), so green is house 4 or 5; white is house 3 or 4. Only white = 4, green = 5 survives milk at 3.
iii.
Set occupations by color. House 2 must be yellow (the teacher, clue 1) since 4 is white and 5 is green; the terracotta house then takes house 1 (the baker, clue 5).
iv.
Read evenings off the constraints. Architect → Monday (clue 4); gardener → Friday (clue 8); Sunday is empty. Tuesday and Wednesday remain for the teacher and baker.
v.
Resolve the cat. Clue 2 sets the cat next to the Tuesday reader. With the dog two doors from the tea drinker (clue 6), the only consistent placement gives baker = Tuesday, leaving teacher = Wednesday.
vi.
Therefore the architect never reads on Wednesday—they read on Monday, by clue 4 alone. □

A word from the schoolroom

Why a puzzle a day

Logic is a habit before it is a skill. The point of logical.day is not the answer—the answer is a small reward—but the cadence: a clean problem to crack open with morning coffee, the same way one might open a window. Five minutes is enough. The chalk dust comes off in the wash.

Tomorrow’s puzzle posts at 6 a.m. local. There is no scoreboard, no leaderboard, no scroll. Only a row of seven small squares, slowly filling in.

— the desk at logical.day