Actorle

Actorle was built by László Kiss, a developer from Budapest, in March 2022. He has said he made the first version in about three days after watching Wordle take off, and that he wanted the same step-by-step feel without copying the letter guessing. Shared scores on Twitter brought in most of its early players, and it has since grown into a small family of film games.

The puzzle is a table of films. You can see when each one came out, what genres it belongs to and how well it is rated on IMDb, while the title is replaced by a row of X marks the length of each word. You guess an actor by name. If your guess appeared in any of those films, their titles are revealed, which gives you something firmer to reason from on the next try. You have eight guesses to name the right person.

The interesting part is deduction more than recall. A career that starts with low-rated horror in the 1980s and moves into prestige dramas tells a story, and the shape of a title, two short words or one long one, can be enough to jog your memory. The site now also offers extra modes such as Expert Daily and Fill The Grid, and the iPhone app bundles the daily games with a multiplayer Groups mode, some of it behind the Actorle Plus subscription.

Actorle suits people who know their way around cast lists and enjoy narrowing down a puzzle. It is harder than a guess-the-poster game, because you have to think about whose career looks like this, not just recognise an image.

Two small hints help along the way. Each guess shows that actor's age, and a bar under the guesses narrows the mystery actor's age between your older and younger tries. A Cinephile mode switch hides the genres and ratings for players who want to solve from the years and the shape of the titles alone.

The daily and its archive are free to play without an account. A free account adds cloud sync and one group of up to ten friends. Actorle Plus, at $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year, removes the ads and opens Expert Daily and larger groups.