Pixel: Item

The icon is enlarged twelvefold to a 768-pixel square and rendered at five block sizes: 192, 96, 48, 32 and 24 pixels — 4, 8, 16, 24 and 32 blocks across, every one of them dividing the canvas exactly. At the hardest level you are looking at four blocks across, effectively the item’s dominant colours and nothing else. It stops at 32 rather than going finer because a shop icon is only 64 pixels to begin with: any further and the last level would simply be the icon.

The roster is Summoner’s Rift only: no ARAM gear, no Arena items, no Ornn upgrades, no champion-locked or unpurchasable entries. That leaves about 210 items, every one of them something you could actually buy in a normal game, and all of them listed in the Shop Inventory below.

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 an item 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

Colour is the whole game early on. Riot codes item art by what it does — red for attack damage, blue for ability power and mana, green for health and lifesteal, gold and white for armour and support items — so the first two levels usually tell you the category even when they tell you nothing else.

Then look for the shape at the centre. Swords, bows, tomes, cloaks and boots each survive pixelation as a distinct mass, and boots in particular give themselves away by being the only wide, low, dark shape in the shop.

There are no hints in this mode — the hint track is built from champion attributes and an item has none — so Skip is the only way to buy a sharper picture without spending a name you might want later.