Pixel: Icon

Four pixels come off each edge of the icon first. Champion portraits carry a dark vignette the art never uses — measured across the roster, that outer ring is four times darker than the middle and its corners thirteen times — so leaving it on spent a whole ring of blocks rendering a black frame. Trimming it leaves the central 120 pixels, and the blocks land on something worth looking at.

That 120-pixel square is then enlarged to 768 and rendered at five block sizes: 192, 96, 48, 32 and 24 pixels — 4, 8, 16, 24 and 32 blocks across. The enlargement is nearest-neighbour, so nothing is invented: it only gives the blocks something to divide, and every block size divides the canvas exactly, so none come out clipped at the edge. The easiest level works out at just under four source pixels per block, which is roughly as fine as this source can honestly go.

By default, auto-reveal shows you each level as you earn it, and reopening the page puts you back on the one you were looking at. Switch it off and unlocking becomes separate from viewing: the buttons under the image still move you between everything you have earned, but nothing changes on screen until you ask it to.

Skip costs exactly one wrong guess and unlocks exactly what a wrong guess would have. It exists so you can pay for a sharper image without spending a champion name you might have wanted later. Give Up reveals the answer at full resolution, but does not count towards your streak.

The blur slider and the grayscale toggle work in the opposite direction to everything else on the page: they make the image harder to read. They are a self-imposed handicap for players who find the unlocked levels too generous. Solving the day resets blur to zero automatically. Each of the four Pixel modes remembers its own settings separately.

Tips

Hair and headgear do most of the work here. The portrait is framed on the head, so the silhouette along the top of the frame — horns, a hood, a helmet, a long fringe — is usually the first thing to survive the blocks.

Palette narrows it faster than shape does. These icons are base art, so a green, blue or purple face is a genuinely short list, and an armoured champion reads as repeated grey blocks where a cloth one does not.

Turn hints on once you are properly stuck. The first arrives at three wrong guesses, and the early ones are deliberately weak — gender and resource type — so taking them early costs you very little of the puzzle.