About Fudgle

Fudgle is a daily word puzzle built around a single question: what happens to a deduction game when the clues themselves cannot be trusted?

The idea

Ordinary word puzzles are games of elimination. You gather constraints and narrow the field until one word survives. It is satisfying, and after a few hundred puzzles it is also mechanical.

Fudgle breaks the part everyone takes for granted. Exactly one tile in every row of feedback is false, and the game never says which. Elimination stops working, because no candidate ever fits all the evidence. What replaces it is a different and better question: which word requires the fewest clues to be lies?

That single change turns a vocabulary test into a reasoning problem, and it makes the keyboard's contradictions the most interesting object on the screen.

How the daily puzzle works

There is one puzzle per day, and every player in the world gets the same word on the same day. That is what makes the shareable result grid meaningful, and it is why the emoji grid marks the tiles that lied to you rather than only the colours you were shown.

Past puzzles remain playable in the archive. Streaks are stored in your own browser and are not sent anywhere.

Design

The visual language is borrowed from polygraph readouts and evidence files: monospace labels, a trace that spikes when you submit, and violet reserved exclusively for deception, so the colour only ever appears where a lie is involved. Nothing in the interface is decorative for its own sake.

Independence

Fudgle is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Wordle or The New York Times. The word data comes from SCOWL and is used under its permission notice; full attribution is on the word list page.

Get in touch

Bug reports, rejected words, and arguments about whether a particular puzzle was fair are all welcome via the contact page.