The rules
How to play Pixelangelo
Pixelangelo is a free daily word game played in the browser. Each day one famous painting starts as a handful of pixels, and you have 6 guesses to find the one everyday word hidden in it. Every miss sharpens the picture.
The daily painting
- Today's painting hangs on the wall at 4 pixels along its short side, far too coarse to recognise.
- The answer is one everyday word for something you can see in the picture. A row of boxes shows how many letters it has.
- Type a word that fills every box. Each letter comes back green (right letter, right spot), yellow (in the word, wrong spot) or grey (not in the word).
- Every guess that misses sharpens the painting, through 4, 8, 12, 20, 32, 56 pixels. No idea yet? Skip a guess to see the sharper picture straight away.
- You get 6 guesses. Once the game is over the real painting is shown, and its word, title, artist and year go up on the wall label.
- Share your result as a grid of coloured squares that gives nothing away, and come back tomorrow for a new painting.
Free play
- Free play goes through the whole gallery with no daily limit: every work once, at your own pace.
- Pick a pack to play through: everything, one kind of work, an era, a theme or a difficulty. Each picture plays like the daily puzzle, and the next one is a button away.
- Every pack shows how many of its pictures you have found and how many you missed. A work found in one pack is found in every pack it belongs to, and a finished daily puzzle counts too.
- The works that are a daily puzzle today or tomorrow are kept out of free play until their day has passed, so it can't be used to look up the day's answer.
Race your friends
- Open a room and send your friends its link or its 5-character code. A room holds up to 8 players.
- The host picks a match of 3, 5 or 10 rounds. Everyone gets the same picture at the same time, with 90 seconds a round.
- Fewer guesses score more: 6 points for finding the word on the first guess, one point fewer for each guess after it, and none for a miss.
- Ties go to the faster player. Guesses are graded on the server, so nobody can look the answer up.
Questions and answers
Is Pixelangelo free?
Yes. It is free to play in any modern browser, on a phone or a computer, with no account and nothing to download.
Do I need to know art history to play?
No. You are looking for an everyday word for something in the picture, not the name of the painting. The title, artist and year are the reward once the game is over.
How many guesses do I get?
6. The painting gets sharper after every guess that misses, and a skip counts as a guess.
What do the colours mean?
Green is the right letter in the right spot. Yellow is a letter that is in the word but in another spot. Grey is a letter that is not in the word.
When does a new painting go up?
At midnight in your own timezone. Everyone gets the same painting on the same date.
Is there more than one puzzle a day?
Yes. The gallery has a wing for each kind of work, and each wing has a daily puzzle of its own: besides the painting there is a print, a sculpture and a photograph. They all play the same way, and the tabs above the puzzle lead from one to the next. Your games, win rate and streak are kept apart for each of them.
Can I play a painting I missed?
Yes. The archive keeps every earlier painting, and each one plays just like the daily. It counts in your games played and win rate, but a streak only grows from paintings solved on their own date. The prints, sculptures and photographs each have an archive of their own that works the same way.
Which paintings are in the game?
243 famous works of art, from Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Vermeer to Vincent van Gogh and Katsushika Hokusai. Most are paintings; the rest are prints, sculptures and photographs. Each kind has a daily puzzle of its own, and every work of that kind comes up once before any of them repeats. A race can bring up any of the works, and free play goes through them all. The images come from Wikimedia Commons.
Can I play more than one a day?
Yes. Free play has no daily limit: pick a pack and go through its pictures one after another, at your own pace. It keeps count of what you have found in every pack, and leaves out the works that are a daily puzzle today or tomorrow.
Can I play with friends?
Yes. Race mode puts up to 8 players in a room with the same picture at the same time. Fewer guesses score more, and ties go to the faster player.
Is my progress saved?
Yes, in your browser. Your games played, win rate, streak and guess distribution stay on the device you play on, and so does what you have found in free play.
Who made Pixelangelo?
Safa Elmalı, @safaelmali on X.