About ANTIQUIDLE

ANTIQUIDLE is a daily Wordle-style guessing game set entirely in classical antiquity — Rome, Greece, China, India, and Egypt — covering the long arc from the founding of Rome in 753 BC to the fall of the Western Empire in AD 476.

What it is

You get one puzzle a day per mode. The grid reveals colored clues — green for an exact match, yellow for a near miss, grey for nothing — until you find the answer in eight guesses or fewer. The mechanic is borrowed from Wordle; the content is drawn from a thousand years of ancient history.

There are five sections, each its own miniature world:

• Rome — the seven Kings, the Republican magistrates, and every emperor from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus.
• Greece — Archaic lawgivers, Classical statesmen, Hellenistic kings. Lycurgus to Cleopatra.
• China — Shang and Zhou kings, Warring States reformers, Han emperors, the Three Kingdoms warlords.
• India — Vedic kings, Magadhan emperors, the Mauryas, the Guptas, and the scholars of the Gupta golden age.
• Egypt — Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, the Amarna heretics, the Kushite black pharaohs, and the Ptolemies.

And a sixth mode — Around the World — for the figures the great five fought: Carthaginians, Persians, Hittites, Babylonians, Celts, Huns, and others, plus an "Ancient Wars" pool drawn from all five main civilizations.

Why classical antiquity, and only that

Most "guess the historical figure" games are either modern-only or chronologically chaotic. ANTIQUIDLE is deliberately bounded: nothing after AD 476. No Byzantine emperors, no medieval kings, no Renaissance polymaths. The Roman section ends with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus. The Greek section ends with the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. The Chinese section ends with the Battle of Fei River in 383. The Indian section ends with Aryabhata and Skandagupta. The Egyptian section ends with Roman annexation in 30 BC. Within those walls, the depth is what makes the game work.

What's in it

• 198 rulers, statesmen, generals, philosophers, and scholars across the five civilizations
• 131 battles, from Mingtiao (~1600 BC) to Cape Bon (AD 468)
• 48 silhouette riddles unlocked through progressive written hints
• 100 deities, heroes, and titans across five mythological pantheons
• 14 imperial quotes attributed to Roman emperors

How it's built

ANTIQUIDLE is a pure static site — no backend, no accounts, no tracking beyond standard analytics. Your streaks and daily-completion state live in your browser's localStorage, not on a server. The site never sees or stores any personal information about you. See the privacy policy for the full breakdown.

Source code is private. Historical content is compiled from standard ancient-history references — Plutarch, Suetonius, Tacitus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Sima Qian, the Arthashastra, the Egyptian king lists — cross-checked against modern scholarship. Where the sources disagree, the game goes with the consensus reading; where the consensus is fragile (legendary kings, oral-history dates), the game notes this.

Who made it

ANTIQUIDLE is built by a single developer who likes daily-puzzle games and ancient history, and noticed the intersection was underserved. If you find a factual error, a typo, or a puzzle that doesn't have a clean solution, the contact email is on the deployment account — the site operator reads every report.