LinkedIn, an email spam service associated with the B2B social network, has made its move to the game. It should have nailed the target audience, not the LinkedIn-branded golf putting kit.LinkedIn started with 3 simple browser games that you can play every day.Here is a kicker to track and share statistics across networks. Yes, it is about to start some friendly competition in the executive seats.

The game is available on both desktop and mobile and is called Crossclimb, Pinpoint and Queens (thanks, The Verge). The main influences are Wordle and Sudoku. Crossclimb sees the player first create a "ladder" of words from its base by changing the letters at once, and then guess the words from the clues. Then when you order these 5 words, only 1 letter changes at a time, unlocking the top and bottom 2 last words...And yeah, me too

I didn't like Crossclimb much, but you had to give it a prop to make it a brand. One of my clues for the word was "Small business ____ (a source of funding for some startups)." The answer, of course, is "loans."

Pinpoint is a simple word association game in which the player has to present a word and guess the category it comes from, and with each incorrect guess, unlock the next word clue. There was a timer, and after fumbling through "Nice" and revealing "Nancy", I realized that it was after the French city and not a feature. This is fine, but there is no Wordle-beater.

Finally Queens is a color-coded grid where you need to place Queens and none touch each other or their lines cross over the board It's nice enough and I can't imagine rushing back but feels like a simplified sudoku. 

Each game has a high score version, from which LinkedIn creates a variety of leaderboards across the network, tracking daily winning streak and showing who else in the network is playing. They are located under the LinkedIn News and My Network section. After you play, LinkedIn will naturally auto-register you for various updates and notifications (you can opt out, or just surrender).

So do not rush everything at once. As gamification goes on, this is a relatively minor one, and I doubt LinkedIn will move far beyond this style of simple product, but the clear inspiration is the great success of the New York Times gaming section, and thanks to its ever-popular Wordle crown jewel, the media has become more and more popular.

For LinkedIn, this is obviously to get the existing user base more involved with the site because there are (yet) no monetization tips. The company claims to have more than 200 billion members in more than 10 countries around the world, which is a huge headline figure, but the real killer statistic it hasn't revealed is how many of these accounts use the site with what regularity.

I signed up for a LinkedIn account when I didn't have a job, because it seemed sensible, but I've never used it since then, and the site's potential seems essentially deflated by the fact that it has that particular use case . This is not somewhere you visit for fun: it's for career-based networking and nothing. Still, at least those of us who have moved on to a respectable career have a new path for the old battlecry: 1vs1 me, coward.