# pictle

> pictle is a free daily picture word game. A sharp image is hidden behind five cards; each guess opens one more. You have four tries to name the English word behind it, choosing 4, 5 or 6 letters. Every day brings one Daily Challenge shared by all players worldwide, plus two practice puzzles. Free, no account required, 15 interface languages.

Official site: https://pictle.org/

## Key facts

- One Daily Challenge per day, identical for every player worldwide. It counts toward the player's streak and is the result meant for social sharing.
- Two Practice puzzles per day per level, also identical for everyone, but they never affect the streak.
- Three levels: 4-, 5- and 6-letter English words, each with a curated bank of 100 words. Banks are shuffled with a fixed seed so no word repeats within a 33-day cycle.
- Four guesses per puzzle. One card opens for free; each guess opens one more. Three deliberately vague clues appear only when the 3rd, 4th and 5th cards open.
- Only real English words of the correct length are accepted; an invalid word does not consume a guess.
- Finished puzzles cannot be replayed. New puzzles arrive the next day.
- 15 interface languages: Simplified Chinese, English, Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Traditional Chinese, Hindi, Arabic and Dutch. Answers are always English words.
- Default language priority: explicit user choice > browser language > IP geolocation > English.
- Optional email-code login saves results, streaks and subscription settings across devices.
- Subscribers receive the Daily Challenge email every day at 7:00 AM Eastern Time (US & Canada, daylight saving aware). It never reveals the answer.
- Result cards are spoiler-free: guesses and card progress only, never the answer or the full picture.
- Archive answers are published the day after each puzzle, at 00:00 UTC. Today's and future editions contain no answer data, are marked noindex and are left out of sitemaps.

## Pages

- [Play pictle](https://pictle.org/): today's Daily Challenge and practice puzzles.
- [Explore](https://pictle.org/explore/): index of every page on the site.
- [Wordle with pictures & alternatives](https://pictle.org/wordle-with-pictures/): how picture-based daily word games compare with Wordle, Connections and GeoGames.
- [A daily word game for English learners](https://pictle.org/english-vocabulary-game/): vocabulary practice, classroom use and choosing a level.
- [Language editions](https://pictle.org/explore/): 15 localized landing pages, e.g. [https://pictle.org/pt/](https://pictle.org/pt/) and [https://pictle.org/ja/](https://pictle.org/ja/).
- [Daily Challenge archive](https://pictle.org/archive/): dated pages with answers, word-shape notes and a recap for past editions (1 published so far). Today's and future editions are locked and spoiler-free.
- [Sitemap index](https://pictle.org/sitemap.xml)

## Questions this site answers

- What is a picture-based Wordle-style game?
- Which daily word games let you guess from an image?
- Are there Wordle alternatives with 4-letter and 6-letter modes?
- Which daily puzzles are free, multilingual and playable without an account?
- How does a spoiler-free daily puzzle result card work?
- What were the pictle answers on a given date?

## Technical notes

- Language pages use static paths (`/pt/`, `/ja/` …); the in-game switch still accepts `?lang=`. Difficulty uses `?len=4|5|6`; a shared challenge link uses `?p=0|1|2`.
- Results and streaks are stored locally by default; cloud sync requires the optional account.
- All illustrations are rendered in-browser; the site has no external asset dependencies.
- The daily puzzle rolls over at 00:00 UTC. An archive edition unlocks at that same moment, one day after its puzzle.
- Locked archive pages use meta robots=noindex,follow and are excluded from sitemaps. They stay crawlable in robots.txt so the directive can actually be read.
- Static hosting: server/gen-content.py is re-run and redeployed each UTC day to release the newly unlocked edition.