New Yorker - Laugh Lines

What New Yorker - Laugh Lines is

New Yorker - Laugh Lines is a daily web puzzle that turns the magazine's cartoon archive into a historical detective challenge. Each day presents a set of New Yorker cartoons, and your job is to arrange them in chronological order — from earliest to most recent publication. The core interaction is placing each cartoon onto a timeline in the correct sequence, which means you're guessing the original publication dates of each piece. It's a semantic puzzle that draws on visual clues, cultural references, and the evolution of cartooning style rather than wordplay or logic grids. The sports-themed selection adds a specific flavor to the daily lineup. Designed to be completed in about five minutes, it's free to play in your browser. The daily entry format gives you a fresh set of cartoons to sort each day, and the historical detective theme makes each puzzle feel like a small investigation into the magazine's past.

How to play

The objective is straightforward: take the day's set of New Yorker cartoons and place them on a timeline in the order they were originally published. You'll need to judge each cartoon's vintage by examining its visual content — the clothing, technology, social settings, and even the style of the artwork itself all serve as clues. The puzzle is built around semantic reasoning rather than wordplay, so your eye for cultural history matters more than your vocabulary. Each daily entry presents a new set of cartoons to sort, and the sports topic gives the selection a consistent thematic thread.

Tips

1. Look for visual cues in the cartoons — clothing, technology, and social settings often date a cartoon more reliably than the humor itself.
2. Consider the style of the artwork; older cartoons tend to have a different line quality and composition than modern ones.