How To Redactle

Redactle is a daily puzzle game, where you're given a Wikipedia article (one of the top 10,000 articles) with most of the words redacted, and you attempt to figure out the title of the article by guessing as few words as possible. Guessing words will reveal all instances of the word. If you enter all the title words, you complete the puzzle, and the entire article is revealed.

• Getting Started
• Tips and Tricks
• Advanced Play

Getting Started

Settings

In the top navigation bar (in the hamburger menu on mobile), there's a Settings option. I highly recommend you turn on "show letter counts on all words".

Learning Puzzles

Some Redactle puzzles are more challenging than others. For learning, here are a few of the less difficult ones to try:

• Daily Puzzle from 2023-04-20
• Daily Puzzle from 2023-06-14
• Daily Puzzle from 2023-07-21
• Daily Puzzle from 2025-12-02
• Daily Puzzle from 2026-01-25

Tips and Tricks

Scanning for Clues

The key information to figuring out the topic and possibly the answer itself is often in the first paragraph or very shortly thereafter. In some cases there are other big clues, much later in the article, so if you're having difficulty, it's a good idea to scan for clues, such as recognizable italicized items (which are usually titles), currency, or special characters such as mathematical symbols or foreign character accents. There are also some common word patterns to keep an eye out for, such as World War II, United States, coup d'etat, Qur'an, numbers (such as population sizes) and units.

Topic Patterns

There are a lot of common topics you'll see in Redactle articles. They often have a familiar structure to them that will help you identify them. For example:

• People - These articles start with a name, followed usually by a birth and usually death date in parenthesis. They then typically go on to talk about the person's nationality and profession in the first sentence. There is also usually an Early Life and/or Education section early on, which may reference where they were born.
• Countries - These articles usually have some information about the bordering countries in the first paragraph. They will also typically reference the population and often area. Sometimes it will list the capital as well. Later in the article you may find references to the climate.
• Chemical Elements - These usually follow a very standard pattern, which includes the symbol and atomic number in the first sentence. You may want to keep an eye out for references to half-life.
• Wars - These usually reference "between" in the first paragraph and have a lot of 3 letter words. You may spot numbers related to fatalities in battle.
• History of - There are many articles where the title starts with this phrase. Some of them are about places, some concepts. For place articles, there will often be dates - usually ones in BC/BCE can be spotted more easily, and sometimes it will refer to million years ago (or mya).
• Species - These will often have italicized phrases, typically referring to scientific names. Sometimes the title is a scientific name, and sometimes it is the common name.
• Media, such as books, music/albums or films - these will often have a an italicized title (or quoted in the case of songs) and will often include references to other works in italics as well.
• Science/Math - these will often include specialized symbols
• Languages - These articles will often have somewhat weird wording structure where they have examples of how the language is used, and sometimes strange characters.
• Sports/Games - Sometimes these will mention round, or have measurements.

Disambiguator

Some Wikipedia articles have a disambiguator in parenthesis at the end of a title to clarify the topic of an article if the word has multiple uses. For example: cuisine, film, game, or sometimes a year.

When You're Stuck

Some articles may be very hard to get a handle on, or you may know enough about the answer to know you definitely don't know the answer without looking it up. How you want to handle these cases are up to you, but if you want to try to figure it out without giving up completely, here are some options:

• Use a hint. You get 3 hints - sometimes revealing a critical word can get you on the right track. Alternatively, just turning on hint mode is itself a hint, because all the title words are not clickable, which can sometimes help you figure things out from the context of where the title words appear.
• Research something about the topic. If you have something to go on, you can look up more information about the topic instead of giving up completely. This is an educational way to learn more while still completing Redactle with assistance. How much research you are comfortable with is up to you, but you may want to try to not accidentally find the Wikipedia article as part of your search.

Advanced Play

When you are ready to challenge yourself further at Redactle and you want to optimize and try to go for some snipes (getting the answer without ever guessing any words besides the title words), or just are trying to keep your guess counts down, here are some things to consider:

• Use the word annotations feature - you can double click on a word to put text in it without officially guessing. This allows you to annotate words that you think you recognize so that you can see them in the text without guessing, which may help you make the article easier to read, and keep track of what you already spotted.
• Play other daily games that help you expand your Redactle skills. In particular this can be helpful for geography related articles like countries and cities. Some geography games to check out:
  • Globle - triangulate a random daily country
  • Globle Capitals - triangulate a random daily capital of a country
  • Travle - find the shortest number of countries that connect the specified 2 countries
• Install the Redactle Tweaks script to add a couple UI enhancements.