Polygonle: The Daily Shape-Based Word Puzzle — Rules, Modes & Where to Play

What is Polygonle?

Polygonle is a daily word puzzle with a twist on the clue. Before you guess anything, you’re shown a row of colored shapes — triangles, squares, diamonds, hexagons — one per letter of the answer. Each symbol represents a letter, so two identical shapes mean the same letter appears in both spots. The official site sums it up as “a daily word puzzle with a shape-based clue.” Daily answers are 6 to 8 letters long, you get six guesses, and a new puzzle appears at midnight in your local timezone.

How to play: 6 guesses, 6–8 letters

The official instructions are two lines: “Guess the word in 6 tries. Each symbol represents a letter in the word.” You can guess any word of the right length — it doesn’t have to fit the shapes — and the tiles then show what each letter did:

• Green — the letter is in the right location.
• Yellow — the letter is in the word, somewhere else.
• Gray — the letter isn’t in the word.

Two tools make it easier to think. The cursor lets you click a tile and fill in just that letter, moving with the spacebar or arrow keys, so you can sketch a partial word without typing all of it. Hold Shift and a letter fills every tile with the same shape at once. Stuck? The hint icon on the keyboard suggests ideas.

Why duplicate letters are the whole game

Every Polygonle answer contains at least one set of duplicate letters, and the shapes tell you exactly where they sit. That turns repeats into information. Guess a word with a double letter and you test several positions at once; if both copies come back gray, the letter is out entirely, and if only one copy lights up, the answer has that letter just once.

The tips page publishes how often each adjacent double shows up in its answers. If you have to bet, bet on the top two:

ss 22.7% · ll 18.6% · oo 9.2% · ee 8.0% · tt 7.2% · rr 5.7% · pp 4.2% · nn 4.1% · mm 4.0% · ff 3.7%

Filler words: the official starters

A common way in is a filler word — a guess picked to test many common letters, not because it could be the answer. A few of the site’s own picks:

• 6 letters: almost, during, family, number, reason, second
• 7 letters: brownie, curious, general, protein, society, through
• 8 letters: abstract, calendar, children, material, physical, sunshine

It also suggests pairs with no letters in common — botany & cruise (6), machine & poultry (7), machined & robustly (8) — which it says give good odds of solving in three or four guesses. Testing common prefixes and suffixes (un-, re-, dis-, -ing, -ed, -tion, -able) works well too, especially when one of their letters lands on a repeated shape.

The six modes

• Daily — the classic: 6–8 letters, at least one repeat, new at midnight local time.
• Unlimited — endless puzzles drawn from past and future dailies. Free.
• Custom — make your own puzzle (5–8 letters; 8-letter words need a repeat), with an optional title and hint. Custom games don’t count toward your streak. Free.
• Mini — a bite-sized 5-letter daily, still with a repeated letter. Polygonle+.
• Archive — any past daily, by number or date. Polygonle+.
• Quadragonle — billed in the menu as “a brand new challenge”: a separate game at quadragonle.com from the same company, where you fill a 4×4 crossword whose letters hide behind symbols.

Difficulty: Hard, Expert and Hexpert

Three settings make it harder, each building on the last:

• Hard mode — any revealed hint must be used in your next guesses. A green P in first place has to stay there.
• Expert mode — every guess must repeat letters in the same pattern as the puzzle’s shapes. For one puzzle the site shows, only words like borrower, desserts, missions or passages are accepted; an ordinary guess like sunshine isn’t. Finding any legal guess takes a while, but once you do, few are left.
• Hexpert mode — both on at once, “the hardest mode Polygonle offers.” Press / to toggle it.

There’s also a high-contrast mode that swaps green and yellow for orange and cyan.

Polygonle+: what’s free and what isn’t

Free: Daily, Unlimited and Custom. Polygonle+: Mini and Archive, plus no ads. The site runs occasional free Polygonle+ days — on the day we checked, a banner offered the full word breakdown after each game at no cost.

Where to play Polygonle

Play it at polygonle.com, the official site. Daily, Unlimited and Custom need no subscription. The menu also links the tips page, achievements and a Discord.

Games like Polygonle

Quadragonle first — same makers, same symbols-for-letters idea, in a crossword. Then grids where the letters constrain each other, like Squareword.