Peerkle

Peerkle sums up its promise in six words shown under the title: eight rungs, one order, five tries. The board presents a vertical ladder numbered from LOW 1 to HIGH 8, with an axis written out above (any measurable quantity: share of forest, hours of sleep, release year, population) and eight tiles in the reserve to place on it. You touch a tile, it turns terracotta, then you touch the rung where you want to place it; touching two rungs in succession swaps their contents. After each submission, each slot displays its verdict using three symbols, and the Clear ladder button has a particularity worth reading the rules for: it returns tiles to the reserve but keeps those that are locked.

1. Read the axis announced above the ladder and its reading direction, from lowest to highest.
2. Touch a tile in the reserve, then the rung where you want to place it.
3. To correct, touch two rungs: they swap their contents.
4. Validate with Submit; the attempts counter advances to the next line, out of five.
5. Read the symbols slot by slot: full for the correct place, half-full for one rung away, empty for two or more.
6. Use Clear ladder to send back to the reserve everything that is not locked, without losing the tiles already locked.

Eight elements is the threshold where ranking stops being intuition and becomes work. At five you see the solution at a glance; at eight you need hypotheses, provisional pairs, an order of attack. The locked tiles that survive the Clear ladder give the game an investigative texture: you dismantle everything except what you've proven, and you start again with a bit more certainty than the previous round.

Three symbols per slot, applied after each try: full when the tile is in its place, half-full when it is one rung away, empty when it is two rungs or more. The site's example carousel runs the mechanic through a four-element alphabetical demonstration, which removes any ambiguity about reading the symbols.

Peerkle of the Day

A daily ranking of eight elements on a named axis, in five tries.

Archive

The site indicates that yesterday's Peerkle and earlier ones remain playable.

• Clear ladder does not reset the board: locked tiles remain in place; it's the button to use when only one half of the ladder resists you.
• Eight rungs for five attempts makes the arithmetic tight: place the extremes first; a tile two rungs off at the bottom costs more to correct than a one-step shift in the middle.
• The half-full symbol signals an exact one-rung difference: two neighbors marked this way are very often two tiles to swap, and that's the cheapest move in the game.
• A separate rules page covers ties on the axis: open it the day two elements clearly share the same value.