Dustword (Dayzle)

About Dustword (Dayzle)

Dustword is one of the daily games on Dayzle, a site of original puzzles by TLL Studios. Every day it invents a civilisation, gives it a name and a line of story, and leaves four to seven tablets. Each tablet shows a picture, such as a blue cat under a tree or three yellow flowers by a moon, with the sentence that describes it written in glyphs.

Each glyph is one word and always means the same thing: a thing, a colour, a number, a place, an action or there is no. Tapping a glyph lights it up on every tablet where it appears, which is the main tool for reading the script. A notebook lets you write your guess at a glyph's meaning, and the note then shows under that glyph everywhere.

Below the tablets is a new picture and a row of empty slots. You fill them with glyph keys and press Check, which spends one of six tries. Every slot then shows a frame for the right glyph in the right place, a dot for a glyph that is in the sentence but elsewhere, or nothing. Every glyph of the answer appears on at least one tablet, and a solver checks there is only one way to write it. If the tries run out, the sentence and the whole language are revealed.

The languages grow through the week. Monday has things and numbers on four tablets; Tuesday adds colours, Wednesday places, Thursday stranger numbers, Friday there is no, Saturday actions, and Sunday mixes everything on seven tablets. From Wednesday at least one word order rule matches neither English nor Spanish. Past days are free to replay from the archive.

How to play Dustword (Dayzle)

1. Open Dustword on dayzle.app and look at the day's tablets: each pairs a picture with its sentence in glyphs.
2. Tap a glyph to see every tablet it appears on, and work out what it means from what those pictures share.
3. Read the word order off a tablet with the same structure as the new picture.
4. Fill the slots under the new picture with glyph keys and press Check to spend a try.
5. Use the frames and dots to fix glyphs and their order, and finish within six tries.

Screenshots

Tips

• Compare two tablets whose pictures are almost the same: the glyph that changes is the thing that differs, such as a colour.
• Count how many tablets a glyph lights up on: a colour glyph follows every thing of that colour, a number glyph only appears with two or three of something.
• Do not assume English word order; a dot often means the right word in the wrong place.
• There may be no word for one: two and three have their own glyph, or the language repeats the thing's glyph.

Questions