How it works
Every day there is one cyclist to guess. The same one for everybody, anywhere in the world. At midnight a new one appears.
Eight guesses
You type a rider's name and pick one from the list. After each guess, six columns tell you how close you were.
Merckx is far off, but one square turns green straight away: Wins. So the rider we are looking for also won more than ninety-nine. The arrows on Age and Pro both point to the present; we want someone much younger who turned pro much later.
Van Aert brings those two arrows close: gold means near. The rider is a few years younger than 31 and turned pro around 2018. Country, Team and Type stay wrong, so it is not a Belgian classics rider.
Vingegaard hits Type squarely: we are after a climber. Age turns gold with an arrow pointing down; 29 is close, but the rider we want is a little younger still. Wins stays wrong: 25+ sits too far from 99+.
Ganna shows what gold on Country means: Italy is not the right country, but it borders it. That cuts the map down to a handful of neighbours in one move; Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Croatia. Green is the country itself; gold is a neighbour.
Roglič gives away the country: Slovenia. Together with climber and an age around 29 there is not much left; only the team and the year he turned pro still have to fall into place.
Found. All six squares green: Tadej Pogačar, Slovenian, 28, UAE Team Emirates, climber, pro since 2019, more than ninety-nine wins.
You would not necessarily need six guesses; with eight attempts there is room to reason instead of guess. Every square that turns green stays green.
What the colours mean
- Green ✓: exactly right.
- Gold ~: close. A neighbouring country, or within three years.
- Light sand ×: no match.
- ↑ and ↓: on age, turning pro and wins: higher or lower.
The three colours run from dark to light: green is the darkest, gold sits in between, a miss is the lightest. That difference in brightness holds up in bright sunlight, where colour itself washes out.
Country, Age, Turned pro and Wins can come up gold. Type and Team cannot: they are either right or wrong, with nothing in between.
Every cell carries a mark in its top right corner as well as a colour; ✓, × or an arrow; so the game works if you see colours differently. There is a separate colour-blind mode on top of that.
The six columns
- Country: green for the same country, gold for a neighbouring country. Only real land borders count, so Belgium and England are not neighbours.
- Age: green within a year, gold within three, with an arrow.
- Team: the team the rider is best known for. Right or wrong, with no in-between.
- Type: climber, sprinter, classics rider, time trialist, all-rounder. Every rider shows one, and that is what you compare: right or wrong.
- Turned pro: the year of the first professional contract, with an arrow.
- Wins: career road wins, in bands: 0–9, 10+, 25+, 50+, 99+, with an arrow.
The five types
- Climber
- Sprinter
- Classics rider
- Time trialist
- All-rounder
Some days are harder
The week has a rhythm, and it is deliberate:
- Monday to Thursday: icons of the sport.
- Friday: an icon too, but always one who has retired. A great name from the past.
- Saturday: a rider a cycling fan knows.
- Sunday: one for the connoisseur. Sunday is race day in Flanders, so Sunday is the hard one.
Men and women are mixed throughout. Not a separate category, not a bonus round.
The bidon
Next to the input field there is a water bottle. If you are stuck, it reveals one column value; one you have not turned green yet, because a column you already know is no help.
- It unlocks after your sixth guess. Not before, and that is deliberate: with two attempts left there is nothing left to drain, and nothing to wait for either.
- One per day, and you ask for it yourself. It never opens on its own.
- Free for everyone. The bidon is not behind a subscription.
Whether you used it shows on your result: full and green at zero, empty and red at one. That is what makes "found in four" comparable between two players.
Your streak
Every day you solve extends your streak; skipping a day or failing to find the rider resets it to zero. The flame in the top right of the app shows where you stand.
If you would rather not miss a day, the app sends one reminder per day at a time you choose. Never more than one, never anything else; and it never gives away anything about today's rider.
Sharing
When you finish, the app builds a card to drop into a group chat: your result, your time, your streak, whether you needed a bidon, and your guesses as a grid of coloured squares. It never contains the rider's name, nor their flag; so sharing spoils nothing for anyone who has yet to play.
A text version goes along with it, with the same squares as emoji, for apps that prefer text over an image.
What it costs
The daily puzzle is free and stays free. So are the bidon, the daily reminder, the share card and your streak.
A subscription unlocks the archive of past days, a practice mode and the numbers on how you play: your win ratio, your average number of guesses, the distribution of your guesses, your average time, which generation of riders you find best, and how often you needed a bidon. Never today's puzzle.
What it does not do
- No account, no login, no registration. The app collects nothing.
- No ads, no analytics, no trackers in the app. This website does count visitors; see the privacy page.
- Works completely offline.