About Spikedle
Spikedle is a daily guessing game about the news. Every day, one English Wikipedia article gets a sudden rush of readers. You see a chart of its daily page views: flat for weeks, then a sharp spike. Your job is to name the article in six guesses.
How to play
- Type the title of any Wikipedia article you think it could be.
- Each guess draws that article’s own page views onto the chart in grey, on the same scale, so you can see whether it spiked on the same day.
- A miss shows an empty square. A close guess, one that peaked within three days of the mystery spike, shows a yellow square. Naming the article solves the puzzle.
- You have six guesses. The answer and the story behind the spike show at the end.
The clues
Every miss unlocks one more clue: what the article is about, what happened, the date of the spike, other articles that spiked the same day, and finally the letters of the title.
Share your result
After the game you can share a grid of squares that shows how you did without giving the answer away, or a picture of the chart. With an account you can also start a group and compare results with friends every day and every month.
Questions
Is Spikedle free?
Yes. It costs nothing, shows no ads and needs no account. An account is optional: it saves your results on every device and lets you compare them with friends in leaderboards.
When is there a new puzzle?
Every day at midnight, your local time. Everyone plays the same spike on the same day.
Where does the data come from?
The charts show daily page views of English Wikipedia articles from the Wikimedia Foundation's public page view data (CC0). Spikedle is not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation.
What counts as close?
A guess is close when its own views peaked within three days of the mystery article's spike. It means you are on the right story.
Can I play past puzzles?
Yes. The archive has every past spike. Archive games are just for fun and do not count towards your stats.
What does Spikedle store about me?
Without an account, your games stay in your browser. Your guesses are checked on our server so the answer never has to be in the page, but they are not stored with your name. The Datenschutz page explains everything in detail.
Contact
Ideas for a puzzle, a mistake in a clue or anything else: write to us.