How to Play Pokedle: A Complete Beginner's Guide

Pokedle is a daily guessing puzzle inspired by Wordle, built for fans of the Pokémon anime. Each day one secret answer is drawn and you have eight attempts to name it. After every guess the game reveals a row of colour-coded clue tiles telling you how close that guess was across every attribute at once.

There are two rosters, and a toggle at the top of the board switches between them. On Trainers, the answer is a character from the anime — a Gym Leader, a Champion, a villainous team boss, one of Ash's companions, or a famous individual Pokémon such as Ash's Pikachu. On Pokémon, the answer is a species from the National Pokédex instead. Each roster is its own puzzle with its own answer, its own leaderboard and its own daily reset, so you can play both in a single day.

There is also an Easy / Hard switch. Easy draws from the well-known slice — the cast an anime-only viewer will recognise, or the Pokémon everybody can name. Hard opens the whole roster: the later regional Gym Leaders, the Elite Four benches and the minor rivals on the Trainer board, and all 1,000-plus species on the Pokémon board.

On the Trainer board the tiles cover Signature Type, Gender, Trainer Class, Organization, Region, Debut Series, whether the character has commanded a Legendary Pokémon, and Power Level. Green means an exact match; red means no match. Trainer Class in particular is all-or-nothing — a Gym Leader guess against an Elite Four answer is simply red, so do not sit there waiting for a "one tier away" hint that never comes.

Power Level is the exception: instead of a colour it shows an arrow. Up means the secret character is stronger than the one you guessed, down means weaker. That single tile is the most efficient filter on the board, because it halves the remaining field with every guess if you use it properly.

On the Pokémon board the tiles are Type 1, Type 2, Generation, Region, Colour, Height, Weight, Base Stat Total, Evolution Stage and Legendary status. Here amber does appear, and only on the two type slots: amber means the answer really does have that type, but in the other slot. Guessing a Flying/Normal Pokémon against a Normal/Flying answer therefore lights up two amber tiles rather than two red ones. Generation, Height, Weight, Base Stat Total and Evolution Stage all use the same up/down arrows as Power Level.

On the Trainer board, start with somebody who sits in the middle of the roster rather than at an extreme. Ash Ketchum is a tempting opener but a poor one: his Power Level is near the ceiling, so the arrow will point down almost every time and tell you very little. Somebody like Volkner, Alain or Solidad — a mid-to-upper Power Level, a common Region, a clearly defined Class — splits the field far more evenly.

If your Region tile comes back green, follow up with a character who shares that Region but differs on Class, Organization and Signature Type. Kanto is especially useful here because the roster holds Gym Leaders, an Elite Four, Team Rocket and Ash's original companions in the same region.

On the Pokémon board, open with a middling single-type species whose Base Stat Total sits near the middle of the range. A Legendary opener wastes the Base Stat Total arrow and the Legendary tile in one stroke, and a first-stage baby Pokémon does the same at the other end.

Region is one of the most powerful filters on the Trainer board. The anime roster spans Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, Kalos, Alola, Galar, Paldea and the Orange Islands. A green Region tile rules out a very large slice of the roster in a single step.

Trainer Class works the same way at the top end. Champions are rare — a handful across every region — so a green Class tile on a Champion guess narrows the field to a few names immediately. Organization is even sharper: only a small number of characters belong to Team Rocket, Team Flare or the Aether Foundation, so a green Organization tile is often close to a solve on its own.

When two candidates survive everything else, Debut Series usually breaks the tie. Keep a mental note of which series each character first appeared in — Original, Advanced Generation, Diamond & Pearl, Best Wishes, XY, Sun & Moon, Journeys or Horizons.

Eight attempts is generous, so spend one of them deliberately. Once you have a couple of green tiles, guess a character you are fairly sure is wrong but whose untested attribute values are exactly the ones you still need — a "sacrificial" guess can unlock three or four new clues at once and still leave you plenty of room.

Track the Power Level arrow like a binary search rather than a hint. Two guesses that bracket the answer from above and below cut the surviving roster down faster than any colour tile on the board.

The two rosters reward completely different knowledge, and both boards keep a separate streak. If you are stronger on species than on anime trivia, the Pokémon roster is the one to build your streak on — and the Easy setting on either board is a perfectly respectable place to play every day.