How to play

Find the spine

A mesostic is a poem with a word running down it: line one holds the first letter, line two the second, and so on. Riddle turns that inside out. You see the poem; the word is hidden. Guess it.

The rules

You get six guesses at the whole word. After each guess, every letter is marked:

A letter in the right line reads as a hit; a letter the word holds, but on another line, reads as present; anything else misses. Letter counts are exact: a guess can never earn more presents than the answer has spare letters.

Stuck? Reveal a letter shows one spine letter outright. You get two per game, and each one counts +1 onto the score you share.

Sharing

Share your score copies a grid of your guesses — never the answer — with the puzzle number and the day. Your guesses and your streak never leave this browser; there are no accounts, no leaderboards with names, and nothing to sign in to.

For teachers

Riddle is a three-minute vocabulary starter. Each puzzle is a tiny close-reading exercise: the solver must weigh every line for the letter it hides, then spell the word the lines agree on. Every line is quoted exactly from a public-domain text — Carroll, Lear, Kipling, Franklin, or the King James Bible — and the reveal names the passage, so a solved puzzle doubles as a reading list. The sources page lists every edition; past puzzles stay playable for classroom sets.

A note on difficulty

These puzzles are hand-built and play-tested against one rule: a fair riddle falls between trivial and cruel. If a puzzle solves in under half a minute or survives past ten, it gets rebuilt or retired. Tell us which ones felt which way — that is the whole test.