Pickle

MLB Pickle is a daily deduction puzzle that hides one major-league ballplayer behind seven columns of evidence: team, league and division, batting hand, throwing hand, birth country, age and position. Type at least two letters, pick a name from the dropdown, and that player's own row locks onto the board, each cell coloured against the answer. Nine rows, nine chances. What separates it from the crowd of sports guessing games is the dropdown itself: it prints every candidate's full attribute row before you commit, and it marks in green anything you have already proven exact, so the shortlist does the bookkeeping for you. There is no login, no paywall and no archive. The browser keeps a guest identifier, a streak, a win percentage and a total, and the round ends with a card naming the mystery player, his headshot, and a link through to his highlights on MLB.com.

1. Open the board and type at least two letters of a major-league player's name; the search will not fire on one.
2. Read the dropdown before committing: each suggestion prints that player's team, league and division, bats, throws, birth country, age and position, with green already marking whatever you have proven exact.
3. Pick a name to spend a guess. The row locks onto the board and every cell is coloured against the hidden player.
4. Weigh the gold cells as hard as the green ones. Gold appears only in Lg./Div., Age and Pos., and each of the three carries its own near-miss rule.
5. Narrow the field and guess again, watching the counter beside the search field count your rows off against nine.
6. Read the results card when the round closes. It names the mystery player, links to his highlights and hands you a grid to share.

Seven columns, three of which answer in fuzzy gold, and nine guesses to converge - the difficulty is in choosing which player splits the remaining field fastest rather than in recalling anyone. That makes it a deduction game wearing a baseball costume, and it rewards anyone who follows transactions and rosters week to week. Most rounds land inside five minutes, longer if you spend guesses arguing with the age band. It is a poor fit for anyone who plays in bursts, because there is no archive and a skipped day is simply gone.

A solid green cell means that attribute is exactly right. A gold cell with a dashed border means close but not equal, and the three columns that can go gold each have their own rule: the player is in the revealed league or division without both matching, an age within two years either way, or a position that is his alternate one rather than his main one. Everything else stays flat grey - wrong, with no gradient of wrongness. A miss costs a row and nothing else, but the ninth one ends the board, names the player anyway and resets the streak to zero.

Daily puzzle

One mystery major-league player a day, nine guesses, seven columns. The menu carries only How To Play, My Statistics and the browser's guest identifier: there is no second mode, no difficulty setting and no archive of past boards, so the day's puzzle is the whole of the game until it rolls over.

• Lg/Div is one cell carrying two facts, so gold there is genuinely ambiguous. Opening with two players from opposite leagues costs two guesses but settles that column outright, which is usually a better trade than another guess inside the same division.
• Gold on Age leaves four candidate years, not five: the exact age would have come back green, so the answer sits one or two years to either side. A follow-up name three or four years away splits that band faster than one a year off.
• The dropdown is a free filter. Once a column has gone green, every suggestion you scroll past shows that column green too, so you can screen candidates against what you already know without spending a row.
• Born is a country, not a city or a state, so it splits the field coarsely but reliably. A grey there kills every player from that country at once, which is worth more early than a team guess that only rules out one roster.
• B and T have only a handful of possible values, so they go green or grey at once and never mislead you with a near-miss. Spend the early rows on the columns that can actually turn gold, and let bats and throws fall out as a by-product.
• Pick for me only sits beside the field until the first guess, so it is an opening aid rather than a lifeline. If you want a random start, take it on row one; after that the button is gone.