Emoji Riddle

Emoji Riddle is the quickest daily puzzle on Pokémon Minigames: five emoji describe one Pokémon character, and you have five guesses to name them. Only the first emoji is visible when the board loads. The other four stay hidden behind question marks and unlock one at a time, so every wrong guess buys you a clue and costs you an attempt.

The emoji sets are written per character rather than generated, which is why they read like riddles instead of labels — a region, a rival, a signature Pokémon and a running joke, stacked in an order that only makes sense once you see the answer. Everyone gets the same riddle each day, and it resets at midnight UTC.

Read the visible emoji, then start typing a name. The search box needs two characters before it suggests anything and shows up to eight portraits; pick one from the list or press Enter to submit the top suggestion. Names you have already tried are removed from the suggestions so you cannot waste a guess twice.

A wrong guess adds a red row to your history and reveals the next emoji, so after four misses all five are on the table for your final attempt. Get it right and the board turns green; run out and the answer is revealed with its full emoji set.

There are two independent boards every day. Easy draws from sixty-seven headline characters — Ash, his companions, Team Rocket, the Champions, the Kanto gym leaders — while Hard uses everyone else, from later-region gym leaders to the Horizons cast. Each has its own answer, leaderboard and streak, so you can play both in a day.

Decide what the first emoji is doing before you guess. It is usually the broadest clue — a type, a region, a role — and on its own it fits dozens of characters. The emoji that narrows the field is almost always the third or fourth, so a deliberate early miss on a plausible name is often better than a blind stab at a rare one.

Watch which board you are on. The autocomplete searches the whole roster while the answer only ever comes from the pool for your difficulty, so naming a deep-cut character on the Easy board burns an attempt on someone who cannot be the answer.

The clock counts up and the daily leaderboard ranks by time rather than attempts, so reading all the visible emoji before your first guess costs you far less than a chain of fast wrong ones. Refreshing does not help either: your guesses, the revealed emoji and the timer are all restored exactly as you left them.