How to Play

The basics

Riftdle sets nine puzzles a day, one per mode. Each mode draws its own answer independently, so solving one tells you nothing about the other eight. Everything resets at 00:00 UTC, and everyone playing that day gets the same nine answers.

There is no account and no guess limit. Your progress for the current day is remembered, so you can close the tab and come back. Your streak and your sound preference are stored in your own browser and nowhere else.

Pixel

Four modes rather than one, sharing a single idea: an image rendered in blocks too big to read, sharpening by one level every two wrong guesses. Five levels each, and you begin on the coarsest. They differ only in what the picture is, and each draws its own answer, so solving one tells you nothing about the other three.

Splash — splash art at 64, 40, 25, 15 and 8 pixels. The art is picked from the champion’s whole skin list, so an unusual skin can make a familiar champion genuinely hard to place — and once you name them, the game asks which skin it was. See Naming the skin.

Default Skin — the same art and the same block sizes, but always the base splash. No skin can mislead you about the palette here, which makes it the gentler of the two.

Icon — the champion’s square portrait instead, trimmed to its central 120 pixels — the outer ring is a dark vignette the art never uses — then enlarged to 768 and blocked at 192, 96, 48, 32 and 24. The source is a tight frame on the head with almost no background, which makes it the hardest of the four.

Item — a Summoner’s Rift shop item from its 64-pixel icon, enlarged twelvefold to 768 and blocked at 192, 96, 48, 32 and 24. About 210 items, no ARAM or Arena gear, and no hints — the hint track is built from champion attributes and an item has none.

Puzzle

Two modes rather than one, sharing a board: the splash art sits behind a six-by-four grid, of which sixteen cells are used as reveal tiles. You start with one unlocked and gain another with every wrong guess. They differ only in which art is behind the tiles, and each draws its own answer.

Splash — the art is picked from the champion’s whole skin list, exactly as in Pixel: Splash. It is the only Puzzle mode with a second round; see Naming the skin below.

Default Skin — always the base splash, so no skin can mislead you about the palette, and there is no skin to name at the end.

With auto-reveal on — the default — each tile turns itself over as it unlocks. Turn it off and unlocked tiles wait as clickable placeholders instead. Either way, clicking a revealed tile hides it again — hiding is free and re-revealing is instant, so you can toggle tiles as much as you like while you think. Locked cells are left as plain board on purpose, so the pattern of gaps gives nothing away.

The tiles are scattered deliberately away from the champion's face, and the tiles nearest it are always the last to unlock — when the face is located confidently it is kept off the board altogether, and when it is not, whatever sits closest to it still comes last. That is the shape of the mode: cheap information is scenery, and the single most identifying tile is the most expensive one on the board.

Naming the skin

Pixel: Splash and Puzzle: Splash both draw a random skin rather than the champion’s base art, so naming the champion only answers half the question. When you get them, the full art is revealed and a second box appears: which of that champion’s skins have you been looking at?

The list is that champion’s skins and nothing else, so it is a short one — but a champion with twenty skins is a genuine test even with the art in front of you. Wrong answers here cost nothing: there is no image left to unlock, so guess as often as you like.

This half does not affect your streak. That is settled the moment you name the champion, so missing the skin — or giving up on it — cannot take back a day you already won. Giving up on the champion, though, ends both halves at once and reveals the skin along with the answer.

The other six modes never ask. Pixel: Default Skin and Puzzle: Default Skin always use skin zero, Pixel: Icon uses the portrait, and the two item modes have no skins at all.

Champion

No image at all. Guess any champion and the game answers with their full attribute row — gender, resource, range type, position, species, region and release year — compared cell by cell against today's answer.

Green means an exact match; on a list attribute that means identical lists, not merely overlapping ones. Amber means a partial match — at least one shared value but not all of them, which is what you see when a champion who plays Mid and Top meets an answer who plays Mid only. Red means nothing in common.

Release year is the exception, because it is a number: a wrong year shows red with an arrow telling you whether the answer is higher or lower. That arrow is usually the most valuable cell in the table, since it halves the roster rather than merely filtering it.

Item

The same comparison table pointed at the shop. Guess a purchasable Summoner's Rift item and compare its total gold cost, the stats it grants, the components it builds from, and whether it has an active effect.

The colour rules match Champion, with two wrinkles worth knowing. Build paths count duplicates, so an item made from two Long Swords does not match one made from a Long Sword and a Pickaxe. And two items that both grant no stats count as a match rather than a miss — otherwise every statless item would read as red against every other one.

Cost is numeric and gets the same higher/lower arrow that release year does in Champion. It is the total build cost, the number the in-game shop shows.

Skipping and giving up

Skip costs exactly one wrong guess and unlocks exactly what a wrong guess would have. It exists so you can buy a sharper image or another tile without spending a champion name you might want later. It appears in the Pixel modes and Puzzle only — Champion and Item have nothing to unlock, so there would be nothing for a skip to buy.

Give Up reveals the answer immediately and, in the image modes, shows the full art. It deliberately does not count towards your streak.

Hints

The Pixel modes and Puzzle hand out attribute hints as you struggle. The first arrives at three wrong guesses and another every two after that, drawn from the same attribute table Champion compares against.

They arrive least revealing first — gender, then resource, range, position, species, region, and release year last — so taking an early hint costs you very little of the puzzle. All hints sit behind a single toggle rather than revealing themselves, so glancing at the page cannot spoil a solve you wanted to earn unaided.

Champion and Item have no hints, because every guess in those modes already returns strictly more information than a hint could give you.

Streaks

Solving a day extends your streak. Giving up does not, and neither does running out of interest — a day you never solve breaks it. The streak lives in your browser's local storage, so it is per-device and clearing your site data resets it.

Ability

One of the day's champion's five ability icons — the passive, or one of the four spells on Q, W, E and R — shown whole at full size. Nothing is pixelated or held back, so there is no image to unlock: wrong guesses bring the next hint forward instead, and Skip buys exactly what a wrong guess would.

Naming the champion is the first half. The second asks which of their five slots the icon came from, with the ones you have already tried crossed off, and is scored separately — your streak is settled the moment you name the champion, so the slot round cannot cost you the day.

Ready?

Pick a mode and start guessing: Pixel (four of them), Puzzle (two), Ability, Champion or Item.