PUZZDLE

PUZZDLE is not played every day: the banner on the homepage announces one puzzle per week, on Saturdays at 14:00 GMT+2, and notes the site is in beta. Each puzzle is open-ended, with no instructions, and is solved with a single word or a phrase. Each puzzle carries an author credit, a date and a difficulty label such as Medium. Below its flavor text, an image lines up series of pictograms, faces, photos and pigs, each topped by a row of letter boxes, some rows showing a green box. Around it are four tools: Annotate to write on the image, Notes, Decoder and Hint.

1. From the homepage, open Play Latest, or View All for the list, or Tutorial for the warm-up.
2. Read the title, the flavor text and the difficulty tag: that's the only instruction; the puzzle never says what to do.
3. Decipher the image line by line, each series of pictograms corresponding to a row of letter boxes.
4. Scribble with Annotate, Notes and Decoder, which open beneath the puzzle without leaving the page.
5. Type the solution, a word or a phrase, into the answer field. Hint remains available if you get stuck.

PUZZDLE imports into the short-form format a tradition foreign to it: the treasure-hunt style of puzzlehunts. No one tells you what to do with the image. You look at faces, photos and pigs lined up above empty boxes, and the first victory is understanding the question. The weekly rhythm fits: it's not a two-minute game between emails; it's something you set down and pick up again, with the Notes panel open beside you.

The puzzle displays neither an attempt counter nor color coding: the only colors in the grid are the green boxes already printed in the puzzle image.

Play Latest

The current puzzle, opened from the homepage.

View All

The complete list of published puzzles, offered on the homepage next to Play Latest.

Tutorial

A warm-up puzzle, offered on the homepage and flagged by a New here? banner at the top of the puzzle.

• The puzzle does not give its instructions: the title and the flavor text are the prompt. In one edition, the story about pigs speaking an invented language is the only indication of what to decode.
• The Decoder is a panel of the site, not a tool to fetch elsewhere: it unfolds under the image next to Notes, and Annotate lets you write directly on the pictograms.