No guesses yet — pick an animal to start
Each guess branches off the clade it shares with the mystery species. The deeper your branches go, the closer you are.
Your guesses will appear here, ranked by how closely related they are to today's mystery species.
Closest relatives in the pool
What is Speciedle?
Speciedle is a free daily species guessing game about the animal kingdom, in the spirit of Wordle. Every day there's one hidden mystery animal, and you close in on it by naming other animals. Instead of matching letters, each guess is scored from 0 to 100 by evolutionary relatedness — how recently your animal and the mystery species shared a common ancestor on the tree of life.
Guess a lion when the answer is a housecat and you'll score high, because cats branched apart recently; guess a jellyfish and you'll land on a distant limb of the animal family tree. Every guess also shows its rank in the pool and the deepest clade it shares with the target, so you can follow the taxonomy — mammals, then carnivores, then cats — and narrow down the answer. There are no accounts and nothing to install: your progress, streaks and stats stay in your browser, and a new puzzle arrives every day.
New here? Read the how to play guide, browse the archive of past puzzles, or learn more about the game and the science behind the scores.