Capitalle

Wordle's structure applied to world capitals, but with a much richer response than a row of coloured tiles. You have six tries to name the day's capital, and every guess comes back with the great-circle distance in kilometres, a percentage saying how close that is, a compass bearing, and a small dossier comparing your city to the target: continent, hemisphere, whether it sits on a coast, and whether the target's population is larger or smaller than what you guessed. Capitalle is one of eight daily games on capitalle.app, and the play.capitalle.app address sends you straight to this one.

1. Type a capital and submit. Anything works as an opener, including a deliberately remote one.
2. Read the row that appears: flag, city, country, distance, then a figure like 81% · SW.
3. Read the four attribute lines below it. A tick means your guess shares that trait with the answer, a cross means it does not, and Pop: ↓ smaller means the target city is smaller than the one you just named.

This is the version of the capital-city game that respects that you can read a map. Distance alone would make it a bisection exercise; the four attribute checks turn it into deduction, because coastal, hemisphere and relative population are facts you actually know about cities even when you cannot place them within a thousand kilometres. Six guesses against a pool of 193 is a genuinely tight budget, and the orange-at-80% band means the feedback stays honest right up to the end rather than going green early. It is free with no account needed, the share card is a map rather than a spoiler, and the same site runs seven other daily games if this one clicks.

The percentage is the number to trust, because it is the one the share grid is built from. The game's own key sets the bands: green is correct, orange is hot above 80%, blue is warm above 50%, and black is cold below that. So Cairo at 3,760 km came back 81% · SW and turned orange, while Hanoi at 10,589 km came back 47% · W and went black. The attribute rows are the part that makes it solvable rather than a guessing spiral. Being told the target is in Africa, in the northern hemisphere, inland rather than coastal, and smaller in population than Cairo eliminates most of a continent in one line. Lose and the share card reads Capitalle X/6 above the colour strip, and it offers to send a world map of your guesses as what it calls a boarding pass, with no spoilers.

Daily capital

The free default. One capital, six guesses, drawn from a stated pool of 193.

Hard mode, no compass

Locked behind the paid tier. Distance still appears after each guess but the direction arrow is hidden, which removes the bearing you would normally triangulate with.

Practice

Also behind the padlock. The Practice button links to the shop rather than to a puzzle, so unlimited practice is a subscription feature rather than a free extra.

• Coastal or inland is the most under-used line in the readout. Roughly half the world's capitals sit on water, so a single cross there cuts the field harder than the continent tick does.
• The population arrow is a real constraint, not flavour. Being told the answer is smaller than Cairo rules out every megacity capital at a stroke, which matters when the compass is pointing across a crowded continent.