Citydle

Citydle is the Wordle shape applied to a world gazetteer. You have six guesses to name the city of the day, and each guess comes back with three pieces of information at once: how many miles you are from the target, which way to head next, and a colour that tells you how close you are politically rather than geographically. Guess Tokyo and you get 6612mi with an arrow pointing north-east; guess Chicago and you get 312mi with a south-east arrow and a yellow tile that says you are in the right country. There is no map. The whole game is a text field, an autocomplete, and a stack of coloured rows.

1. Type a city into the field. An autocomplete filters as you type and you have to pick from its list.
2. Press Guess. The city is spelled out in tiles, followed by the distance in miles and one of eight direction arrows pointing from your guess towards the answer.

It scratches a different itch from map-clicking games. Citydle never shows you where anything is, so you have to hold the world in your head and reason about it in miles and compass points, which is a genuinely rare skill to practise. The colour ladder gives it a satisfying shape too: the run of grey rows, the jolt when one turns orange, then the yellow that means you are hunting inside a single country with two guesses left. Games take a couple of minutes and the streak counter gives you a reason to come back.

The four-colour ladder is what separates Citydle from a pure distance game. A grey Sydney at 9357mi and a grey Lima at 3494mi are both wrong, but the colours tell you nothing about each other, whereas the jump to orange the moment you hit the right continent is a real narrowing. The arrows are eight-way, so ↘ genuinely means south-east and not just 'somewhere over there', and pairing that with the mileage makes the last two guesses feel like proper navigation.

Core play

A single default daily puzzle: you have six guesses to name the city of the day using a text field with autocomplete. Each guess returns the city spelled out in tiles plus three pieces of feedback (distance in miles, an eight-way direction arrow, and a colour from the game's four-colour ladder).

• Open with two cities on opposite sides of the planet. Tokyo and Lima between them will almost always drop one grey and one shorter grey, and the difference in mileage tells you which hemisphere to work in.
• Chase the colour, not the distance. Moving from 6166mi to 4178mi while staying grey is progress you cannot use. Turning a tile orange is worth far more, because it collapses the answer to one continent.
• The pool leans towards big cities and capitals, so once a tile turns yellow, run through that country's largest cities rather than trying to name the exact spot the arrow points at.