Whodle

Whodle is a person guesser built on comparison rather than on letters. Five column headers sit across the top of the board, OCCUPATION, GENDER, ALIVE, COUNTRY and BIRTH YEAR, and they stay empty until you name someone. You guess by typing into a search box and picking a name from the dropdown it offers, and every guess fills a row of five cells comparing your pick against the hidden figure. The rules give you six attempts. A lightbulb button sits beside the board for a hint, and a leaderboard underneath carries Day, Week, Month and All Time tabs, filled with guest players.

1. Type a famous person's name into the search box and select from the dropdown list rather than typing a name freehand.
2. Read the five cells that fill in: occupation, gender, alive status, country of birth and birth year.
3. Follow the colours, and on the birth year column follow the arrow as well.
4. Narrow it down and name the right person within six guesses.

Attribute guessers live or die on whether their columns actually split the field, and Whodle picked five that do: occupation, gender, alive or not, country of birth and year of birth cut a crowd of famous people from very different directions. Because only the birth year has a middle setting, the board reads fast, and the up and down arrow turns each guess into a proper binary search rather than a shot in the dark. It is a game of pruning, and the pleasure is in watching a field of everyone who has ever been famous collapse to a handful of candidates in three or four moves. The leaderboard with its daily, weekly, monthly and all time tabs gives the six guess limit something to mean once you are past the puzzle itself.

The colour code is stated plainly by the rules panel: green is an exact match, red is wrong, and yellow means close, which in this game means one thing only, a birth year within ten years. On top of that, the birth year cell carries an up or down arrow telling you whether the real answer is higher or lower than your guess. Four of the five columns are therefore binary, and all the shading lives in the date.

Core play

The page presents a single default puzzle: you type a famous person's name into a search box and select from the dropdown, and each guess fills a row of five comparison cells (OCCUPATION, GENDER, ALIVE, COUNTRY and BIRTH YEAR) against a hidden figure. The rules give six attempts, a lightbulb button provides a hint, and feedback uses colours (green exact, red wrong, yellow only for birth year within ten years) with an up/down arrow on the year cell to show higher or lower. The page shows this one gameplay flow, with no alternate modes or separate game types.

• Yellow only ever appears on the birth year, and it means within ten years. Treat it as a decade wide net rather than a vague encouragement, because the other four columns will never give you one.
• The arrow does more work than the colour. A red birth year with an up arrow eliminates everyone born earlier, so opening with someone from the middle of the plausible range buys you a bigger cut than opening with a favourite.
• The search box is a closed list: you pick from the dropdown, so if a name does not come up it is not in the pool, and that is itself information about how big the pool is.