Bookidle

Bookidle is a small daily game for readers, run as a one-person project by a maker who prefers to stay unnamed. Each day it sets two puzzles, a cover to recognise and a set of clues to read, so you can play either or both.

In Cover Guess, the book's cover starts out as a grid of large blocks of colour, with the year it was published, its genre and its page count shown above. Each round you can guess or skip, and either way the next round shows a clearer cover. You type a title or author into a search box and pick from the suggestions. After five tries the full cover and the answer are shown.

In Clues Guess you get single-word clues instead, credited to the clue writer. The first is the hardest, and each guess or skip brings the next, easier one, up to five in all, with the same year, genre and page count above them. The help page says both games share one secret book, but on the day we played they asked about two different books, so treat them as separate puzzles. Both games use the same scoring squares: red for a wrong guess or a skip, and yellow when you have the right author but the wrong book.

Progress saves in your browser with no account, you can copy a result to share, and the archives for both games go back to February 2026. A Featured Books page lists books that have appeared. The site carries an ad network script and asks for ad consent on the first visit.