Heptaveegesimal

About
Periodle, is a word guessing game inspired by Wordle. But instead of guessing a 5-letter word consisting of any of the letters from A to Z, you have to guess a word spelled from 5 elements of the periodic table from Hydrogen to Oganesson. Words you can enter can thus vary in length from 5 to 10 letters, as long as they can be spelled from elements of the periodic table and are valid English words.

Each day there is one word to guess which is the same for everyone playing on that day. As some of my previous projects, this game runs on German time, which may be different to your timezone. Words may thus not change at midnight, but on the plus side, everyone gets the same word at any time.

The word to guess is selected from a manually filtered list of over 1000 words, which vary from 6 to 10 letters. 5-letter words were excluded here.

How To Play
If you already know how to play Wordle, skip to the "What are orange letters?" section below.

Each day you have 8 attempts to guess a word and once you make a guess the elements will turn gray, orange, yellow or green. A gray element does not appear in the solution. If an element shows up yellow, then it appears in the solution but at a different position. If an element turns green, it is in the solution and it is at the correct position. Once you guess the correct word, all letters will be green.

In this example, the solution is S P Ra Y Er. In the guess C O P P Er, both carbon and oxygen are not part of the solution and thus show up gray. Phosphor is in the solution, but at a different position, the first one shows up yellow. The second phosphor shows up gray, as the solution only contains one phosphor. Erbium however, is at the correct position and will thus shows up green.

Please keep in mind that these colors may be different if you have changed the color theme. This description currently doesn't dynamically adjust to with the color theme.

What Are Orange Letters?
While Wordle and most of its clones only have gray, yellow and green letters, Periodle introduces orange letters or orange elements. When an element is highlighted orange, it is contained in the word to guess. But the element does not appear in the solution itself.

Here the solution was Pr Ac Ti C Al. In the guess P I Ra C Y, carbon is at the correct position and shows up green, while yttrium is not part of the solution and shows up gray. While phosphor and iodine are not part of the solution, the solution contains the letters P and I, thus those two show up orange. Radium is not part of the solution either, but the letter combination Ra shows up between promethium and actinium.

This way, if a single letter element shows up gray, it does not only mean that this element is not part of the solution, but that any double letter element containing this letter can't be part of the solution. In the first example carbon shows up gray, thus Calcium, Copper, Chlorine and many more, cant be in the solution either, otherwise carbon would have shown up orange. In such a case, those elements also show up gray in the periodic table keyboard.

Feedback And Discussions
For feedback or discussions of the game, you can go to the Discord Server. Just make sure to mark any hints for the current word as a spoiler. You can discuss older words in whatever way you like, as they change for everyone at the same time. Alternatively, you can send me feedback in an E-Mail to joshua@heptaveegesimal.com.

Web Storage
This site does not use any cookies. Local Storage is used for statistics, guessed words as well as the selected options. All data remains on the client side. If you wish to delete all data, open the settings and go to the "Delete My Statistics" section, this will of course lead to you loosing all your statistics.

Settings
Instead of the normal periodic table of elements, you can alternatively try an alphabetically sorted table of elements. This may be useful if you are less familiar with the periodic table, as this makes it easier to see which combinations of letters are possible in this game. For the true Periodle experience, it is recommended not to use this setting.

Alphabetic Table

Do you know a word in a different language that would be a good guess? This option will allow you to guess words from any of the languages listed below, not just the selected one. Words from other languages won't be the solution, but they might help you to get more information, if you are otherwise stuck.

Guess Any Language

When an announcement happens, the news page will open when you visit the page. If you do not wish to receive these notifications, you can turn them off here.

Automatically Open News Page

If someone sends you a link to a word that is not part of the word list (which could just be a nonsensical combination of elements) and this setting is on, a warning will be displayed. If you get an unlisted word, you will still be able to guess it for that game, but it might not be a plausible word. Note that this option does not warn you for links to obscure words that are part of the word list.

Warn For Unlisted Words

When you unlock a new achievement a notification will pop up at the top of the screen. If you do not wish to see these you can disable these notifications with this option.

Achievement Notifications

When Periodle detects that an external translation tool (browser extension or similar) is applied to the site, the player will receive a warning as such tools can break the game in unexpected ways. If you are experiencing false positive warnings or want to mess with the broken page you can disable this warning with the following option.

No Translation Tool Warning

Colors
If you don't like the default look of the game or if you are struggling with distiguishing the different colors or want a bit of an extra challenge, here are some alternate color themes for you to pick from.

With your currently selected theme, the game will look like this (Black, Orange, Yellow, Green from left to right):

Delete My Statistics
If you wish to delete all your statistics and settings in this game, flip the switch below to reveal the delete button. Upon pressing the delete button, all your progress will be deleted and it will be as if you were visiting the page for the first time.

Show Delete Button

News

Two-Year Anniversary
Another year has passed, Periodle is now two years old, and people are still playing it! So with this I wanted to say another Thank You to everyone who has been playing.

Over the past year not too much has been added, except for the Achievement Update and the April Fools Version. Yet despite all of that the daily visits still usually ranged between 250 and 450. Below is an image of the daily visits over the past year with some markers. While I'm not aware of any videos or similar about Periodle I did add a marker for Icely making a video on Minesveeper, which may have indirectly lead people to Periodle.

(View this image in full resolution)

Back To 5 Elements
Yesterday was another April Fools' joke, Periodle will now return to using words spelled with 5 elements. You can still play yesterday's version Here, although only in practice mode, and that version will no longer receive updates in the future.

5 Elements Are Too Much; Let's Try 4
For the almost 2 years that Periodle has been going on, this game used words spelled from 5 elements of the periodic table. However, I have come to the conclusion that for the sake of game balancing it would be better to instead use words spelled from only 4 elements. So starting today, Periodle will now make this switch. Where before you could enter words varying from 5 to 10 letters (with solutions ranging from 6 to 10 letters), possible words now range from 4 to 8 letters (and solutions from 5 to 8).

Achievements
An update at last! I've been wanting to add achievements to this game for a while now! And I have finally gotten around to doing so.

So with this update the game now adds 18 achievements you can try to collect, though I may add more in the future. Achievements come in two stages: Silver and Gold. The silver achievement is unlocked by reaching that achievement while playing in practice mode. Meanwhile for the gold achievement you will have to reach it on a daily puzzle (some exceptions exist). Overall I tried to make the achievements mostly independent from the regular statistics, so no achievements for completing a game in a certain number of guesses, playing a certain amount of games in total or reaching some success rate. Instead achievements are intended to encourage some slightly different play styles or try out certain challenges. Note that if a player wishes to minimize their average guesses, they should feel free to ignore achievements that would be disadvantageous to their statistics. While some achievements may naturally come with optimal play at some point, others may make the game more difficult when attempting.

This update comes with some additional minor bug fixes.

One-Year Anniversary
One year already since this game started and I honestly did not expect this game to still have as many active players as it does. So with this I just wanted to say Thank You to everyone who has been playing Periodle throughout the past year, no matter if you have been playing every day or just a single game.

My motivation for making this game was that I was interested in the concept of a Wordle like game with the elements of the periodic table and if I didn't make it myself, who else would be crazy enough to do this. When I released it, I was half expecting it to fade into complete obscurity after maybe 10 days, so what was to come was quite a positive surprise. However after some initial fixes on day zero, I posted it to Reddit on day one, where it got a lot of attention and ending up with an article by Reviewgeek on day two it got a lot of attention, bringing it to just over 10000 visits on day five with another appearance in DerStandart by day 14. Below is an image of the daily visits with some markers for relevant events, such as Scott Stro-Solves playing the game on day 209.

(View this image in full resolution)
One of my thoughts in before releasing this game was that if there were still around ten daily visits by day 100, I would count this as a success. Turns out I'm still averaging around 400 and sometimes up to 500 daily visits after one year.

With this said, there are still some smaller additions I want to make to the game, although I am not going to making any specific promises about what I plan to add or when such an addition will be made.

Sorry About Yesterday
Yesterday was an April Fools' joke, element 119 and 120 have not yet been discovered and neither will they have those names.
You can still play yesterday's version Here, although only in practice mode, and that version will no longer receive updates in the future.

Elements 119 And 120
Periodle celebrates the recent discovery of the two new heaviest elements: Expandium 119 and Joshaium 120. 119 bringing us the first new element discovery after over 10 years (Tennessine was first announced in 2010, but only officially received its name in 2016) and also expanding the Periodic to its eighth row. Perhaps the biggest challenge of this discovery being the decay behavior of these elements, no longer undergoing Alpha Decay (Emitting a ⁴He nucleus), but instead emitting a ¹²C nucleus and thus not matching any expected alpha decay chains. The synthesization has likely already succeeded throughout many past attempts, with the elements likely just falling under the radar.

Starting today, these two new elements can now be used for your guesses in Periodle!

Free Play And Word Links
Probably the largest update yet.
Alongside the daily word, you can now play an arbitrary amount of words in practice mode. These practice mode games do not count towards your statistics, you can mess around in these in whatever way you like without it effecting your statistics. On top of that, if you want to challenge someone to a specific word you can now go into setup mode, where you can enter any word that can be spelled with five elements and get a link to that word. Those links will then start the game in practice mode and with your specified word.

This News Page
Added this News Section!
Future updates to the game will be announced here. This page will show up whenever there is something new. If you don't want this page to show up, you can disable it in the settings. All news below here, I have added retroactively.

Color Themes
Added various color themes to make the game more accessible to anyone who is colorblind. Although some themes are more intended as a challenge instead of serving as accessibility. This reintroduces the Alpha Color Theme I used during early development, which is probably worse for accessibility.

German Periodle
Added a German version of the game.
Game data is now stored using local storage and no longer uses cookies.
The language can be changed in the settings, both puzzles can be played independently each day.

Periodle!
Start of this game with day 0 of course. This was a slightly chaotic start due to the very incomplete word list, which got expanded a few hours later.

Times Played		Times Solved		Percentage Solved		Average Guesses
0		0		-		-