Redactle

Redactle displays an entire Wikipedia article completely redacted: each word is replaced by a black block showing its letter count, and only a few function words remain readable to give the framework of the sentences. You suggest a word, and all its occurrences are revealed at once throughout the article. The title is bracketed: revealing it is enough to win, and the game explicitly notes that it's never necessary to clear the rest. The day's grid is numbered in the header, a timer runs, and the right column keeps a log of your guesses.

1. Type a word into the input field at the top of the right-hand column.
2. Read what is revealed: every occurrence of the word appears at once in the article, and the guess is recorded in the list with its number of occurrences.
3. Use the shape of the text rather than its content: the rules panel shows that a two-word title followed by a parenthesis with dates almost always indicates a person.
4. Test categories with probe words the game itself suggests: born for people, city, country, river or mountain for places, species for living things, film, album or war for culture and history.
5. Narrow things down until the bracketed title falls, which ends the game.

It's a deduction game disguised as a vocabulary game. What you read at first is not text but a skeleton: prepositions, linking verbs, and black rectangles whose length is already information. The right strategy is therefore never to guess the subject directly but to pin it down by categories, which the game teaches openly by providing its own list of probe words. The moment when a multiple occurrence lights up in five places in the article and the whole structure tips over is a sensation few word games manage to produce.

Feedback is quantitative, not color-coded. Each guess joins a numbered list with, beside it, its number of occurrences in the article: a word absent from it comes back at zero and reveals nothing. The black blocks display the number of letters of the word they hide, which turns the text into a grid of constraints readable even before the first success. A title counter and a timer remain displayed at the top right, next to the hint, give up and multiplayer buttons.

Core play

A single default puzzle: a redacted Wikipedia article presented as the day's numbered grid with a title in brackets, an input for guesses, a guess log, a timer and buttons such as HINT, GIVE UP and TEAM UP. There are no separate modes or alternate rule sets, play consists of solving that one daily puzzle.

• Don't clear the article: only the bracketed title counts, and the article is just a means to get there.
• The function words left in the clear are the real entry point. An "is a" followed by an eight-letter block says a lot before a single content word has been found.
• The letter counts shown on the blocks are clues: a very long word in a first sentence is often a nationality or a category, two easy targets to probe.
• The game recommends opening with a word that tests a category rather than with a rare word: born, city or species split the space of possible articles in two.