Find The Needle

About Find The Needle

Find The Needle turns the old saying into a short daily search. The haystack is a wide field of straw tiles drawn in your browser, and a single needle sits under one of them. You pan around the field, zoom in and out, and tap one tile at a time. Each cleared tile is painted in a colour with a word to match: Freezing, Cold, Warm, Hot or Burning, from far away to right next to the needle.

The daily puzzle is seeded from the UTC date, so every player who opens the game on the same date searches the same field, with the needle in the same place. Puzzles are numbered by days since 1 January 2026. The first time you finish on a given date is your daily result, and it feeds a streak; later plays can improve your best time but do not replace that result. A timer and a try counter run while you search, and you get one hint per game.

The daily field is the Normal size. Easy is a smaller field where the hint word always matches the true distance, and Hard is wider, with hint words that wobble more and some tiles that hide wire. Easy and Hard are practice and do not touch your streak. When you find the needle, the result lists the puzzle number, your time and your tries, with one coloured square per try, ready to copy.

The game needs no download and no account, and your streak and best times stay in your browser's local storage. It suits anyone who likes a quick hot and cold hunt in place of a word or number puzzle.

How to play Find The Needle

1. Open the daily puzzle and drag to pan around the haystack, or tap the small map in the corner to jump.
2. Pinch or roll the mouse wheel to zoom in on the straw.
3. Tap or long-press one tile to clear it.
4. Read the colour and word on the cleared tile: Freezing and Cold mean far away, Warm means the right area, Hot and Burning mean close.
5. Clear tiles closer to the warm ones until you uncover the needle.
6. Copy or share your result with the puzzle number, time and tries.

Tips

• While the hints are cold, sweep in a loose grid to cover ground quickly, then tighten your taps once a tile turns warm.
• On Normal and Hard the hint word can be slightly off, so check the tiles around a hot one before trusting it.
• Save your one hint for when you are stuck between several warm tiles.
• Practise on Easy, where the hint word always matches the true distance, to learn how the colours step.

Questions