Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Circle Back?
Circle Back is a free daily puzzle game. Every day, you get four pieces of corporate jargon and eight possible plain-English translations. Your job is to match each phrase to what it actually means.
New puzzle drops at 9am Melbourne time. One puzzle per day, shared by everyone playing that day. The game takes about 30 to 60 seconds.
It is free. There is no app. No account needed.
How do I play?
You will see four corporate phrases and eight decoded options below them.
Drag each phrase onto its matching decode, or tap a phrase and then tap the decode you think fits. If you match incorrectly, the pair resets — you can try again.
When all four are matched correctly, you are done. Your result shows your time, how many first-try matches you got, and your current streak. You can share the result directly from there.
The share text is plain text, no image. It pastes cleanly into Slack, Teams, iMessage, LinkedIn — wherever you want to send it.
Why does the puzzle refresh at 9am Melbourne time?
Two reasons.
First, the game is for people who work in offices, and mornings are when office culture is most active. The morning tea run, the first Slack messages, the daily standup — that is when a puzzle fits naturally. A 9am drop means the puzzle is fresh when most people arrive or check in.
Second, all players share the same puzzle on the same day. A 9am Melbourne reference time means everyone in Australia and New Zealand is playing the same puzzle on the same calendar day, regardless of their local timezone. If you are in Perth, the puzzle unlocks at 7am your time. If you are in Auckland, it is 11am. Same puzzle, same day.
Can I play yesterday's puzzle?
Not yet. Once you have played today's puzzle, the result is locked and yesterday's puzzle is gone.
We are thinking about archive access for v2. If that is something you would use, send us a note through the feedback form and it will influence where we spend the time.
How do I share my result?
When you finish a puzzle, a share card appears below the result. Tap or click the share button. The result copies to your clipboard as plain text.
It looks like this:
Circle Back #042
3/4 first-try · 47s · streak 7
circlebackaustralia.com
Paste it wherever you want. It reads cleanly in any app, no image rendering needed.
If you are sharing on LinkedIn, the link preview will show the game's social card automatically.
Is there a paid version?
No. Circle Back is free and will stay free in this form.
There is no premium tier in v1. No subscription, no one-time payment, no ad unlock. The puzzle pool is pre-generated and runs for well over a year. There is no email capture and no account — share by copying the grid or using the share button.
Where do the puzzles come from?
The jargon corpus was built by cataloguing Australian corporate phrases across seven categories: verbs of inaction, empty-vessel nouns, time-warping phrases, hierarchy-encoded passive aggression, performative acceptance, meeting theatre, and restructuring euphemisms.
Puzzle drafts are generated from this corpus. Every puzzle is reviewed by a human before it goes into the rotation — we check the decode is accurate, the AU voice is right, the difficulty is calibrated, and the content meets the content guidelines (no real people or companies, no political content, nothing in the content kill list).
The difficulty rises across the week. Monday puzzles are straightforward. Friday puzzles are harder — the jargon is more genuinely ambiguous, the decodes are closer together.
Can my company sponsor or collaborate?
Maybe. We have not built a formal sponsorship model yet, but we are open to the right conversation.
If you work at an organisation and want to explore something — a custom puzzle pack, a team challenge, a brand partnership — get in touch with the team at InnMotion. The contact details are at innmotion.com.au.
How do I report a bad puzzle?
Use the feedback form linked from the footer of the game. Tell us the puzzle number, which phrase you think is wrong or badly worded, and what you think the correct decode should be.
We review every report. If the puzzle is wrong, we fix it in the pool for future players and note the correction. If you disagree with the decode but it is defensible, we will note the alternate reading in the puzzle metadata for future consideration.
We take the quality of the decodes seriously. The point of the game is that the decode is accurate, not just funny. If we got one wrong, we want to know.
Who made this?
Circle Back is powered by InnMotion. InnMotion is an Australian software company that builds tools for real problems.
This particular problem is: Australian workers have to speak a language at work that does not mean what it says. Circle Back makes the gap visible, one puzzle at a time.
If you want to see what else InnMotion builds, innmotion.com.au.