Poeltl

Poeltl is the NBA player guessing game that now sits on the players' union domain. The board is closer to a spreadsheet than a puzzle: one box reading Guess a player, a Show Silhouette button beside it, a clock that ticks upward, and a table with eight column headings waiting to be filled in. Name, Team, Conference, Division, Position, Height, Age, Number. Eight numbered rows sit underneath, one for each guess you are allowed.

1. Type a real NBA player into the box. Nonsense gets you nothing: an invalid entry never produces a row.
2. Read the row across all eight columns. Four of them are categorical, Team, Conference, Division and Position, and three are numeric, Height, Age and Number.
3. Press Show Silhouette when the table stops narrowing. It sits right next to the input and is the only hint the game offers.
4. Use Flashback in the header if you want a previous day instead of today's player.

The pleasure is the table, not the guess. Eight columns is a lot of information arriving at once, and because close counts across height, age and number, one badly aimed guess can still cut the league down to a handful of plausible names. Then there is Show Silhouette, sitting there from the first second, which turns deduction into a small negotiation with yourself: take the outline and admit you are stuck, or keep swinging blind through eight rows.

Green is an exact match, yellow is a close one, and the How to Play panel says precisely what close means in each column. Yellow on Team means the player used to play for that team rather than plays for it now. Yellow on Position means he plays at least one of the positions shown. Yellow on Height, Age or Number means you are off by at most two. That last rule is the sharp one, because a single yellow number fences the answer into a narrow band on either side of your guess.

Flashback

The header button opens a Play a Previous Day panel where you choose a date. The panel states in capitals that it will NOT count towards your stats or be saved.

• Treat a yellow number as better news than a green category. Team or Conference eliminates by group, but a yellow Age or Number is a hard numeric bracket, capped at two either side by the rules.
• Team is career history, not the current roster. A yellow team cell means the player once wore that shirt, which makes well travelled veterans unusually informative opening guesses.
• Decide about the silhouette early. It is a button, not a reward for surviving a certain number of rows, so leaving it untouched until guess eight buys you nothing.