Promptle is a daily guessing game for the AI-art age, and the premise is almost aggressively simple: an AI image is dealt from our gallery, and your job is to name the words the artist's original prompt contained. Most of them are things you can literally see. The fun is discovering how much of the image someone bothered to write down.
The rules in one minute
- One image a day at midnight UTC, the same puzzle for every player worldwide.
- Type a word and submit it. Green means it is one of the day's keywords. Yellow means the prompt used the word somewhere, but it is not a keyword. Gray means the prompt never used it at all.
- Plurals count: guessing "wolves" finds "wolf". Variants and morphological near-misses resolve to their base.
- There is no hard attempt limit. Your score is how many keywords you uncovered and how many guesses it cost you.
- Stuck? The give-up button reveals the full prompt and its author. No penalty except pride.
- Clear a puzzle every day to grow your streak. The share button copies an emoji grid, puzzle number and link — postable without spoiling anything.
Missed a day, or want a warm-up before today's puzzle? Every past puzzle stays playable in the archive — pick any date and play it cold.
Habit 1: name what you see, literally
The first instinct is to describe the scene like a caption — "a girl standing in a forest" — and captions are mostly wasted guesses. Prompt keywords tend to be the concrete nouns and materials the artist typed: "lantern", "kimono", "rain", "street". Look at the image and list the physical objects. If it is visible and specific, someone probably typed it.
Habit 2: think in prompt vocabulary, not captions
The second habit is switching register. Prompts are written in a technical vocabulary that captions never use: "portrait", "macro", "silhouette", "backlit", "grain", "pastel", "matte", names of lenses and old cameras. When you look at an image, ask what a photographer or a prompt writer would call what you are seeing. "Blurry background" is a caption; "bokeh" and "depth of field" are prompt words. Half of Promptle is learning to see like someone who writes prompts.
Habit 3: mine the yellows
Yellow is the most underrated signal in the game. A yellow word is inside the prompt, just not a keyword — which means yellows cluster around the actual answers. If "cat" comes back yellow, the keywords nearby are probably its attributes and companions: colors, materials, actions, settings. Do not chase yellows at random; treat each one as a pointer to a word family and sweep that family before you move on.
When you are stuck
Reveal the prompt rather than grinding — the reveal is the best lesson in the game. Read it against the image and notice which words you could have found, then go play a couple of archive puzzles with that vocabulary fresh. And when a revealed prompt turns out to be from a gallery page you like, the artwork always links back to its own page, where the editorial note under the image breaks down exactly which words do the visual work — which is, in the end, the trick Promptle is training: reading images the way their prompts were written.