Spectrle

Spectrle reduces a film to a color disc: 500 images taken at regular intervals throughout the film, sliced and rolled into a circle. You must name the film behind this palette in at most five guesses, with the tagline and release year shown from the start. The site also publishes a version devoted to video games and two nine-square grids.

1. The disc of the day is displayed with the release year and the film's tagline, above the "SUBMIT A GUESS" field.
2. Type a title and select it from the autocomplete to validate your guess.
3. Each wrong guess or each Skip unlocks two things at once: a written hint, and the same disc redrawn with fewer images, therefore wider and more readable slices.
4. The order of hints is fixed: the tagline at 500 images, the director at 100, the cast at 50, the plot at 30, then a "silly synonym" of the title when only 10 images remain.
5. Five attempts in total, to be compared to the par displayed on the day's entry.

Because a film has a color before it has a title, and Spectrle demonstrates it in reverse. You don't recognize an image, you recognize a mood: a shift toward ochre in the second act, a block of blue that won't let go. When the disc falls to ten slices, recognition becomes almost physical, and you feel bad for not seeing it at five hundred.

Two signals, one visual and one textual. The disc becomes coarser with each failure, and that's precisely what makes it legible: ten slices of a film are ten shots reduced to their dominant color. On the text side, a suggestion drawn from the correct franchise lights up in yellow, just to indicate you're getting warm. The site specifies that a skip costs one attempt just like a wrong guess, without unlocking anything more or less.

Movie Spectrle

The film of the day to find behind its color disc, in five guesses.

Game Spectrle

The same mechanic applied to a video game, with a streak of wins counted separately from the films.

Movie Grid and Game Grid

Nine titles fixed on the board, nine discs to drag onto them. Lock In checks the grid, correct pairs turn green and lock, five confirmations to solve everything.

Archive

Past games remain open and can be filtered by genre, by decade and by par.

• Read the disc like a timeline: it starts at the top and turns clockwise, from the opening credits to the final shot.
• Zoom in on a slice, the site recommends it itself, and it's often at that scale that a set or a light becomes recognizable.
• Skipping isn't an admission of weakness: a skip unlocks exactly the same hints as a wrong guess, for the same price.
• The par isn't the same for all films; it's calculated from the title's popularity. Succeeding in three tries therefore doesn't carry the same value from one day to the next.