A cove of daily guessing games.
Fourteen small games, one new puzzle each in every one of them, every day. Each is built on a public dataset - Wikidata, the Smithsonian volcano catalogue, USGS earthquake records, the aviation weather feeds - and each one ends by telling you what the answer actually was and why it is worth knowing.
They are free, they run in a browser, there is nothing to install and there is no account to make. Your streak lives in your own browser and never leaves it.
Most of them are guessing games: you name a ship, a tower, a mineral or an airport, and every guess is scored attribute by attribute until you close in on the answer. Three of them are decoding puzzles instead, where you are handed a real report filed by a real weather service or seismic network and asked five questions about how to read it.
Aviation and weather
Two of these decode a real report filed by a real weather service this week. The other three are guessing games about the machines and places that report belongs to.
Earth and nature
Volcanoes, earthquakes, minerals and protected land - the catalogues that geologists and park services keep, turned into a daily puzzle.
The built world
Things people put up and had to justify the height, the span or the megawatts of.
At sea
A ship a day, a warship a day if you want one, and the lights that kept them off the rocks.
How a day works
Every game serves one puzzle a day, the same puzzle for every player, rolling over at midnight UTC. The day is not a random draw from the dataset: each game runs a curated calendar, built ahead of time so that no answer ever repeats and the widely known answers come before the obscure ones. Several games ramp within the week as well, from an approachable Monday to a harder Sunday.
You get six guesses in the guessing games. Each guess is scored against the answer column by column: an exact match, a partial match where an attribute holds several values, an arrow when a number is higher or lower than the one you guessed, and a blank when it is simply wrong. That feedback is the whole game - you are narrowing a field, not stabbing at names.
When the puzzle ends, the game shows you the answer with a short piece of writing about it, drawn from the same public sources the puzzle was built from. Several games then offer a few bonus rounds on the side, comparing today’s answer with something else in the set.
Where the questions come from
Every game is built on an openly licensed dataset, frozen into the game before it goes out, with the source and licence named on that game’s attribution page. Wikidata (CC0) carries most of the guessing games. The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program stands behind Volcanodle, the US Geological Survey behind Quakedle, OurAirports behind Airport-dle, OpenFlights behind Airline-dle, and the NOAA aviation weather service behind METAR Daily and TAF Daily.
The explanatory text you get on the reveal is quoted from those sources rather than generated: English Wikipedia extracts under CC BY-SA 4.0 in most games, the volcano’s own Geological Summary in Volcanodle, and in the two aviation games a full decode written by the site’s own parser. No part of a puzzle is written by a language model at play time.
If a fact in a game looks wrong, it is worth telling us: the datasets are public, so a correction can usually be traced and fixed at the source as well as here.