Hunterdle

How the daily round works

No server picks the word, and there is no dictionary lookup happening anywhere. Today's date is turned into a number, that number seeds a deterministic draw against a bank of Supernatural-flavored words, and that draw decides both the word and — because the guess grid is exactly as wide as the word is long — the shape of the board everyone sees today. Every browser that opens this page today gets the identical word; tomorrow's date draws a different one, and yesterday's still draws yesterday's. No guess of yours is stored or fetched, and there is nothing in the draw that can go down.

The day rolls over at midnight UTC, not your local midnight, for the same reason the trivia gauntlet next door uses UTC: local midnight would hand somebody in Auckland a different word than somebody in Los Angeles for most of the day, and the whole idea of a daily puzzle is that everyone comparing notes is looking at the same one.

Guessing, and why there's no dictionary check

Type a guess the same length as the blank row waiting for it and press Enter, or the Guess button. You get six tries regardless of how long the word is. There is deliberately no dictionary behind this page checking whether your guess is a "real" word — every diversion in this corner is a pure function of the page's own URL and the date, which means no guess is sent anywhere, which in turn means there is no word list to check one against even if it were wanted. Any string of letters at the right length is accepted as a guess. That's a stated design choice, not an oversight: it keeps the whole game running with zero network calls, at the cost of letting you burn a guess on nonsense if you want to.

Each submitted guess comes back one tile per letter, colored and labeled. A tile marked correct is the right letter in the right spot. A tile marked present is a letter that's in the word but currently in the wrong spot. A tile marked absent means that letter isn't in the word at all — or, if the word repeats a letter, that you've already accounted for every copy of it with an earlier correct or present tile. Every tile carries both a color and a small mark and label alongside it, so the result reads the same whether or not color is something you can rely on.

Sharing a result without spoiling the word

Finishing a round — solving it or running out of guesses — gives your result its own link, and a copyable block of colored squares that shows the shape of your guesses without a single letter in it, the same convention the original word game popularized. Open somebody else's link for today's word and you'll see their pattern and nothing else — the word itself stays hidden, because handing it to you would end your own attempt before it started. Once a day's Hunterdle has rolled over, its link shows the full answer and the note behind it instead, since by then there's nothing left to protect.

What the word bank draws from

Every entry is a single term pulled from the show's own vocabulary — wards and lore objects like salt, a sigil or an amulet; creatures like a wraith, a rugaru or a wendigo; roles like hunter, vessel or reaper; and a handful of names the show made famous, including a couple of angels and demons. Every note revealed at the end of a round was written fresh for this page in plain descriptive language — no dialogue, no script text, no episode quotes anywhere in it, the same posture the rest of this fan corner holds.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

More diversions

The Supernatural hub collects every quiz and tool in this wing, including the trivia gauntlet and the hunter-type quiz next door. The fan tributes hub has the rest of the corner, including the original Which Great House Are You? quiz. If you'd rather play a game than guess at one, Iron Realms is free in the browser.