| Guess | Type | Flag | Launched | Tonnage | Length | Status | Builder |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
How to play Shipdle
Shipdle is the only game in this family that shows you a photograph. It opens as a coarse mosaic of blocks and sharpens one step with every wrong guess, over seven scored columns and six tries.
You get 6 guesses. Each one is scored against 7 columns - Type, Flag, Launched, Tonnage, Length, Status and Builder - and the scoring is the whole game: you are narrowing a field rather than naming it cold.
Type, Flag, Status and Builder are exact or nothing: the cell turns green when your guess holds the same value as the answer, and stays blank when it does not. Tonnage is a band, and it is scored on how far apart the bands sit: the same band is green, one band either way is yellow, and further away is blank. Launched and Length are numbers, and an arrow points from your guess towards the answer, so a wrong number still tells you which way to go. Length in m.
A column the source leaves blank is marked as having no data rather than scored. It cannot come back green for anyone, on any guess, which means an unrecorded value is never a lucky hit - and the gap itself is a fact about the record, so the grid shows it instead of hiding it.
The photograph
There are six rungs to the ladder. The first is coarse enough for a silhouette and a colour and nothing else; the last is fine enough to read a hull shape and a superstructure, but still too coarse for any lettering on the bow. You move up one rung per wrong guess, so a player who solves it in two has seen very little.
Every rung is rendered ahead of time when the game is built, and the page steps through them as you guess. The sharp photograph is the part that is genuinely withheld: it is not in the page at all until the round finishes.
Seven columns of vessel
Type, flag, builder and status either match or they do not. Launch decade and length are numbers with an arrow towards the answer, and length is exact, in metres, which narrows the field faster than anything else once you have a sense of scale. Tonnage is a band rather than a figure.
Many of the 1,289 vessels in the pool have no recorded status, and those cells read unknown rather than being filled in with something plausible.
Warships is its own game
The warships daily at /warships is not a mode switch dressed over the same puzzle. It has its own dataset, its own calendar, its own photo pool and its own streak, kept separately in your browser, so playing one has no effect on the other.
Its columns are different too, because the questions worth asking about a warship are different: class, navy, commissioning decade, displacement bracket, fate and length. It is worth reading the reveal even on the days you get it in one.
Photographs, licences and why the calendar is short
Vessel data comes from Wikidata under CC0 1.0. The photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and every single one is licence-checked individually before it ships: United States government public domain, PD-old, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, and never NonCommercial or NoDerivatives. The progressive pixelation is a derivative work, so where the source is CC BY-SA the derived images keep the same share-alike licence, and every photograph's author, licence and source file is credited on the attribution page.
That check is also why the calendar is 75 days long while the pool holds 1,289 vessels. A vessel can only be a day's answer if it has a photograph that has passed the licence review, so the calendar grows at the pace of that review rather than the pace of the dataset.
Where the data comes from
- Wikidata - CC0 1.0
- Wikimedia Commons photographs - licence verified per photo (US government public domain, PD-old, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA; never NC or ND)
Shipdle is built on 2 openly licensed sources, frozen into the game before it goes out. The licence is named next to each one above, and the same list, with the per-record detail, is on the Shipdle attribution page.
The writing you get on the reveal is english Wikipedia summary excerpt, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is quoted or generated from the source, never written by a language model while you play, and it carries its own credit and licence line wherever it appears.
The pool holds 1,289 entries and the calendar already runs 328 days, one answer a day, no repeats. That sequence was built offline before release and ships inside the game, so it is the same for everyone and nobody can read tomorrow out of the page. The day rolls over at midnight UTC.
Nothing is lost when a day ends. Every puzzle that has already run stays playable in the archive, and its answer, with the same reading you would have got by finishing it, is published the day after it ran.
Every past answer · Sources and licences in full · Shipdle on Gamecove
Questions
- Do ships and warships share a streak?
- No. They are two separate dailies with separate calendars, separate photo pools and separate streaks stored under separate keys in your browser. You can play both on the same day, or only one.
- Is it the same puzzle for everyone?
- Yes, in both modes. One vessel a day for every player, rolling over at midnight UTC, from a calendar fixed in advance.
- Do I need an account?
- No. Nothing to sign up for and no account or profile on our side; your streak and stats are kept in your own browser's local storage. Guesses themselves are scored on the server, which is how the answer stays out of the page.