What is Citydle?
Citydle is a text-based geography guessing game built on the Wordle formula. You have six attempts to name the city of the day using only an autocomplete field. Each guess returns three pieces of feedback at once: the distance in miles to the target, an eight-way compass arrow pointing from your guess toward the answer, and a colour tile that shows political proximity rather than pure geographic distance. There is no map. The entire game is played through typed guesses and coloured feedback rows.
How to play Citydle
Type a city name into the text field and select one of the autocomplete suggestions. Press Guess to see the city in a tile, along with its distance from the answer in miles and one of eight arrows showing the direction to it.
Use the colour feedback to narrow the search: grey means the guess is wrong and has no political relationship to the answer, orange means it is on the correct continent, and yellow means it is in the correct country. You have up to six guesses, with each round tracking the colour feedback and distance.
Reading the three feedback layers
The colour ladder separates Citydle from a pure distance game. A grey tile at 9357 miles and another grey at 3494 miles are both wrong, but the colours reveal nothing about their relationship to each other. The moment you hit the right continent the tile turns orange, which collapses the search space. Yellow means you are inside the target country with two guesses remaining.
The arrows use eight compass directions, so ↘ genuinely means south-east rather than a vague "over there." Pairing that precision with the mileage makes the final guesses feel like real navigation rather than random stabbing.
Strategy for tighter guesses
Open with two cities on opposite sides of the planet. Tokyo and Lima will almost always produce one grey and one shorter grey, and the mileage gap tells you which hemisphere to work in.
Track the colour change before the distance drop. Moving from 6166 miles to 4178 miles while the tile stays grey is progress you cannot use. Turning a tile orange is more valuable because it limits the answer to one continent.
When a tile turns yellow, work through that country's largest cities and capitals. The game favours major urban centres, so testing the biggest names first is more efficient than trying to pinpoint the exact spot indicated by the arrow.
Why Citydle rewards city knowledge over precision
It scratches a different itch from map-clicking games. Citydle never shows you where anything is, so you hold the world in your head and reason about it in miles and compass points. That kind of mental spatial reasoning is rare to practise. The colour ladder gives each round a satisfying arc: the run of grey rows, the jolt when one turns orange, then the yellow hunt inside a single country with two guesses left. Games take a couple of minutes and the streak counter gives you a reason to return daily.