Cathedraldle
A daily great-church puzzle where two of the four columns can be partly right
Cathedraldle is a daily guessing game about great churches, scored on country, denomination, architectural style and built century. Two of those four columns can come back partly right, and learning to read a partial is most of the skill.
What counts as a great church
The pool of 717 buildings is drawn from three Wikidata classes taken together, cathedrals, basilicas and church buildings, each one required to have an English Wikipedia article. That is wider than the game's name suggests, on purpose. Westminster Abbey is an abbey and a collegiate church rather than a cathedral, and a game about great churches that could not ask you for it would be a poorer game.
There is one documented exception on top of that union. Hagia Sophia stood as a church for centuries and as a cathedral for most of them, but present-day Wikidata types it as a mosque and a museum, so it would otherwise fall out of the pool entirely. It is admitted as a single reviewed historical-use case, and its denomination cell shows its present affiliation rather than its former one. The exception is item by item; mosques as a class are not in the game.
Partial credit, and why it exists
Denomination and architectural style are stored as sets rather than single values, because great churches genuinely carry more than one. A building can hold both a present-day and a historical affiliation, and plenty of them map to more than one style family: a Romanesque nave under a Gothic vault with a nineteenth-century west front.
So those two cells come back exact when the whole set matches, close when your guess and the answer share at least one value, and blank when they share none. Styles are grouped into families rather than left as raw labels, from gothic and romanesque through baroque, renaissance, classical, byzantine, the revivals and the modern. Grouping is what makes a partial mean something.
Century, country and the day's sequence
The remaining two columns are simpler. Country matches or it does not, and built century is a number with an arrow towards the answer, spanning everything from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Where a record carries no usable date the cell reads unknown rather than inventing one.
The calendar runs 717 days and uses every building exactly once. Each week ramps from the buildings that the most language editions of Wikipedia write about towards the ones that almost none do, so a Monday and a Saturday are not the same kind of ask.
After the guess
The reveal quotes the building's English Wikipedia extract verbatim under CC BY-SA 4.0 and links to the article, alongside its heritage designations where they exist. All the attributes themselves come from Wikidata under CC0 1.0, frozen into the game before release.
Up to five bonus rounds follow, drawn from elsewhere in the set: which of two churches is older or taller, which one belongs to a named style, which one is affiliated with a named denomination, which one carries a named heritage status. What sticks, after a few weeks, is the map, which countries built in which centuries and what a style family actually looks like on a plan.
Questions
Why is Hagia Sophia in a game called Cathedraldle?
Because it is a great church building and a former cathedral, admitted as a single documented historical-use exception. Its denomination column shows its present affiliation rather than its historical one, and the exception does not extend to mosques generally.
Is it the same puzzle for everyone?
Yes, one building a day for every player, rolling over at midnight UTC, from a fixed calendar rather than a random draw.
Do I need an account?
No. Nothing to register and nothing stored on our side. Streaks and stats sit in your browser's local storage.