How to Play Numberdle

Numberdle hides one six-digit number each day and gives you 8 tries to find it. Every guess is answered three different ways at once, and learning to read all three together is the whole skill of the game. This page covers the rules, each type of hint, and the habits that reliably cut a guess or two off your daily score.

Play Today's Puzzle

The Goal of the Game

The answer is always a whole number between 100,000 and 999,999 — six digits, never starting with a zero. You have 8 guesses. Every guess must itself be a valid six-digit number, which means you are never wasting a turn on a number that could not possibly be the answer.

That range holds 900,000 possibilities. Narrowing it down by halving the range alone would take about twenty guesses, far more than you are given, so the digit hints are not a garnish — they are the main tool. A good player finds the answer in four or five tries by working out which digits are involved before worrying much about their order.

How Each Guess Gives You Hints

Submitting a guess returns three separate pieces of information:

1. Direction. An arrow tells you whether the hidden number is higher or lower than what you guessed. This never contradicts itself, so you can always trust the most recent arrow to bound your search.
2. Distance band. A word tells you roughly how far off you are. The bands are Scorching (within 10), Hot (within 100), Warm (within 1,000), Cool (within 10,000), Distant (within 100,000) and Cold (more than 100,000 away). Each band is a factor of ten wider than the one before it, so moving up a band means you have genuinely closed in.
3. Digit verdicts. Each of the six positions is marked individually, which is where most of the useful information lives. See the next section for how to read these.

Reading the Hints: Right Number, Wrong Place

Every digit in your guess comes back in one of three states:

Exact

That digit is correct and in the correct position. It is locked; keep it there in every later guess.

Present

That digit does appear in the hidden number, but somewhere other than where you put it. This is the hint worth the most, and the one players misread most often.

Absent

That digit does not appear anywhere in the hidden number — or every copy of it has already been accounted for by other positions in the same guess.

That last clause matters when a digit repeats. If you guess 114,235 and the answer contains only one 1, then one of your two 1s comes back marked and the other comes back absent. The absent mark does not mean "no 1 anywhere" — it means "no second 1". Reading it as the former will send you down a dead end.

The strongest single clue in the game is six Present marks at once. That tells you that you have identified every digit in the answer and that not one of them is in the right place, which turns the remaining work into rearranging a known set of six digits.

5 Tips to Improve Your Daily Score

1. Open with six different digits. A first guess like 102,345 tests six digits at once. Opening with 500,000 tests only two distinct digits and tells you far less — measured against the full range, a six-distinct-digit opener returns roughly eight bits of information where 500,000 returns about five.
2. Spend guess two on the other digits. Your first guess covers six of the ten digits. A second guess built mostly from the remaining four — something like 678,901 — usually settles the full digit set by the end of turn two, which is the hard part of the puzzle.
3. Let the arrow order the digits. Once you know which digits are involved, direction and distance tell you how to arrange them. If you know the answer uses 2, 3, 3, 6, 7 and 0 and the arrow says lower than 363,270, you can rule out every arrangement above that in one step.
4. Treat a jump in band as a measurement, not luck. Going from Cold to Warm means the answer sits within 1,000 of your last guess. Combined with the arrow, that leaves a window you can often finish inside one more guess.
5. Never re-test a locked position. If position three came back Exact, every later guess should keep that digit in position three. Changing it throws away information you already paid a turn for — the single most common way players waste guesses.

When Does the Puzzle Reset?

A new number appears at 00:00 UTC every day. The clock on the home page counts down to the next one. UTC is used rather than your local time zone so that everyone changes puzzles at the same moment, which keeps shared scores comparable no matter where the people comparing them live.

Your streak counts consecutive days solved. Miss a day and it returns to zero; solving a past puzzle from the archive will not repair it.

Is Numberdle Free?

Yes — completely. There is no paid tier, no account, no advertising interruption to the board and no feature held back. The game is a single static page that runs entirely in your browser: the hidden number is computed on your own device from today's date, so there is no server cost per player and no reason to charge for one.

Frequently Asked Questions