I wanted to brush up on Indian mythology and figured the easiest way to actually retain it was to gamify it daily. Trivia apps exist, but they fall apart after the novelty wears off: long quizzes with no shared moment, no streaks worth defending, no five-second “did you get it?” conversation with a friend.
The Wordle-style daily puzzle solves this. One puzzle per day, same for everyone, takes two minutes, generates a small share moment. That format works for words (Wordle), for songs (Heardle), for movies (Framed). Hindu mythology, with thousands of canonical figures across the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, and Vedas, has more pool depth than any of those.
I checked the existing landscape. There are mythology trivia apps, multiple-choice quizzes, and educational sites. There was no daily-shared puzzle game where my friends and I could compare results in a group chat. So I built one. Mythguess is that game.
What Mythguess does
A new character drops every day at midnight IST. You see one clue. If you cannot guess, you submit any character name you suspect (typing into an autocomplete that only accepts characters in the database). A wrong guess advances the next clue, hardest first to easiest last. You have five attempts. Solve in fewer clues and your share grid is greener.
The character pool is 150 figures across six hint categories: Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranic, Vedic, Regional, and Historical. Easy figures show up Monday and Tuesday, medium on Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday, hard on Friday and Saturday. The same puzzle is served to everyone in the world for 24 hours, then it rolls over.
Free, no signup, runs entirely in your browser.
🧩Daily mode
This is the headline mode. One puzzle, shared globally, reset at midnight IST.
Five clues reveal in order, hardest first. Clue one is usually a tight literary reference or an obscure plot detail; clue five is essentially a description of the character with their name almost spelled out. Submit a wrong guess (any real character from the database) and the next clue fires. Submit something the database does not recognise (a typo, a name we have not added) and the input shakes. It does not consume a clue, it just signals “not in the pool, try again”.
Streaks follow the Wordle pattern. Solve today, your current streak ticks up by one. Miss a day or fail to solve, your current streak resets to zero. Your longest streak is preserved separately as a personal best, so a bad day does not erase the achievement. Replays of past puzzles do not affect streak.
A one-shot Hint button reveals the broad tradition (Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranic, Vedic, Regional, or Historical). This costs one orange slot in your share grid, so players who solved without the hint get a slightly cleaner result. Use it when a clue stumps you and you want the family of texts as a hint without giving up.
Eight achievement badges are tracked alongside the streak: First Win, three-day, seven-day, and thirty-day streaks, Speed Demon (solved on clue 1), Determined (solved on clue 5), Mythology Scholar (five hard solves), and Completionist (twenty-five total solves). Badges unlock on Daily wins only, so Practice and Archive plays do not count.
Practice mode
Daily is great for the streak chase. Practice is for everything else: learning the pool, killing time, training for tomorrow.
Practice gives you a random character from the pool with no streak stakes. Filter by difficulty (easy, medium, hard, or any) to focus on a tier you want to learn. Play as many rounds as you want; nothing is recorded against your Daily history.
Two buttons in Practice that Daily does not have: Skip clue and Reveal answer. Skip advances to the next clue without consuming a guess slot. Reveal ends the round immediately and shows the character profile, useful when you genuinely have no idea after two or three clues. Both exist because Practice has no stakes: the goal is exploration, not endurance.
Practice is also where you learn the regional figures we recently added: Andal of Tamil Nadu, Manasa of Bengal, Iravan of Manipur, Meera Bai of Rajasthan, Chamundeshwari of Karnataka. Filter to hard tier and you will encounter the deeper cuts.
Archive
Every past day’s puzzle stays available. Open the Archive tab, see a calendar of all puzzles since launch, click any day to replay it.
Archive is for missed days, friends who joined late, or just curiosity about what the puzzle was on a specific date. Like Practice, it has no streak impact. The buttons (Skip clue, Reveal answer, and Hint) are all available.
Replays are tracked in a separate local-storage bucket so they do not contaminate your Daily history. If you solved Tuesday’s puzzle in Daily and then replay it in Archive a week later, your Daily record stays intact and the calendar shows both states (solved-in-Daily plus replay outcome).
Sharing your result
After you solve or fail, you get a share button. Three options: WhatsApp, X (Twitter), and clipboard.
The share text is an emoji grid: five squares, one per clue. Green for solved on that clue, grey for unused, orange for the hint. Plus a one-line message and a generic link to /games/mythguess. Crucially, the share never reveals the character’s name. Your friends can click the link and play the same puzzle without spoilers.
This matters because Wordle’s emoji-grid format proved the social mechanic. People share their result as a humble brag (or a humble loss), the friend opens the link, plays cold, comes back to compare. That cycle is the daily-puzzle game’s core viral loop.
If you want to share a specific past puzzle (Archive day), the share function is intentionally disabled there. Replays are for personal play, not for posting. Daily-only sharing keeps the result text honest about what was actually today’s puzzle.
The 150 characters
The pool is split 23 easy / 50 medium / 77 hard. Easy is Hanuman, Krishna, Rama, Shiva, Durga, Lakshmi: figures most readers will know from childhood stories. Medium goes deeper: Vidura, Eklavya, Vibhishana, Narasimha, Karna’s full backstory. Hard reaches into less-traveled territory: Markandeya the immortal sage, Lopamudra the philosopher-wife of Agastya, Trijata the rakshasi who comforted Sita, the Naga princess Ulupi who married Arjuna in the underwater realm.
The six hint categories tag the broad tradition:
- Ramayana: figures from Valmiki’s Ramayana and its retellings
- Mahabharata: figures from Vyasa’s Mahabharata
- Puranic: figures from the major Puranas (Bhagavata, Vishnu, Shiva, Skanda, and others)
- Vedic: figures from the Rig Veda and early Vedic literature
- Regional: figures whose worship or narrative is strongly tied to a specific region (Vithoba in Maharashtra, Ayyappa in Kerala, Manasa in Bengal)
- Historical: real historical figures (Thiruvalluvar, Adi Shankaracharya) whose cultural weight earned them a slot in what is otherwise a mythology game
Regional coverage was deliberate. South India is over-represented in mainstream mythology coverage relative to Bengal, Northeast India, and Maharashtra. The pool includes characters specifically to balance that: Mariamman and Andal from Tamil Nadu, Vithoba from Maharashtra (and the Varkari poet-saint tradition that surrounds him), Manasa from Bengal, Iravan and Chitrangada from Manipur, Meera Bai from Rajasthan, Chamundeshwari from Karnataka, Kannappa from Andhra and Tamil Nadu.
Villains are included. Ravana, Duryodhana, Shakuni, Mahishasura, Hiranyakashipu, Kamsa, Putana, Surpanakha. They are framed neutrally in the clue text: we do not call them evil, we describe what they did. Where a figure traditionally classified as an adversary also has an active worship tradition (Mahishasura among some Adivasi communities, Barbarika at Khatu Shyam, Mayasura in some Tantric contexts), the post-game profile acknowledges it. Mythology is more layered than the surface telling.
How difficulty actually works
Tier assignment is editorial, not algorithmic. Three rough tests for whether a character is “hard”:
- Recognition cost: would a reader who studied the Ramayana and Mahabharata in school know this name? If yes, easy or medium. If only a serious reader of the Puranas or regional poetic traditions would know, hard.
- Clue-1 obscurity: how cryptic can the hardest clue be without being unfair? A hard character opens with a single literary detail; an easy character opens with multiple recognisable hooks.
- Cross-tradition presence: figures who appear in multiple major traditions (Krishna, Hanuman) are easy almost by definition. Figures known mostly through one regional or sectarian tradition (Andal through the Alvars, Vithoba through the Varkari saints) skew harder.
The current 23/50/77 split skews hard, which we will rebalance over time as the pool expands. For Daily mode the weekday gradient (easier on Mon/Tue, harder on Fri/Sat) keeps the average win rate inside a reasonable band.
Editorial method
Three rules shaped every clue:
Primary sources only. Every character’s clue draws from canonical texts: Valmiki’s Ramayana, Vyasa’s Mahabharata, the major Puranas, the Vedas, regional poetic traditions like Sangam literature and Varkari abhangs. The Sources section at the bottom of the game page lists each text with approximate scholarly dating.
Neutral educational tone, not devotional. The clues describe what figures did, not why we should worship them. This is mythology as cultural content, not religious instruction. Where two textual traditions disagree (for example, Valmiki’s original Ahalya was made invisible by Gautama’s curse, while Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas turned her to stone), the clues call out which version is which and which text is the source.
Honest hedging. Where scholars disagree about dating, etymology, or attribution, the clues say so. Tirukkural’s date is contested between the 3rd century BCE and the 5th century CE; that is in the Sources block. Bhagavata Purana scholars place it anywhere from the Gupta era to the 10th century CE; we cite the prevailing consensus and note the dissent.
Aliases are handled deliberately. Krishna can be answered as “Krishna”, “Govinda”, “Gopala”, “Keshava”, “Kanha”, “Vasudeva”, or any of about a dozen other epithets the autocomplete recognises. Diacritics and capitalisation do not matter (“kṛṣṇa” resolves the same as “Krishna”). Where two characters share an epithet (Yudhishthira and Yama are both called “Dharmaraja” in different texts), we drop the shared alias from one of them so autocomplete is never ambiguous.
The em-dash is banned across the entire codebase, a small editorial preference. The transform script that compiles character data strips em-dashes automatically. (You will not find a single one in this post either.)
Privacy and installing as an app
Mythguess runs entirely in your browser. Your streak, history, badges, and stats live in localStorage on your device. Nothing is sent to any server. Clear your browser data and you start fresh; switch devices and your streak does not follow.
We collect anonymous page metrics through Google Analytics (page views, mode use, solve distribution) the same way the rest of DesiUtils does. We do not see your individual results, your guesses, or anything that would identify you.
Install as an app on mobile. On Android Chrome, the address bar offers an “Install app” prompt or you can use the 3-dot menu. On iOS Safari, use the Share button and tap “Add to Home Screen”. The installed app launches in its own window without browser chrome, opens directly to the game, and works offline once it is cached. Local storage persists between web and installed-app use, so your streak follows you.
This matters for a daily game. Two-tap access from the home screen (tap the icon, see today’s puzzle) is a much better daily ritual than typing the URL into a browser tab.
What is next
Three things on the roadmap, in order of likelihood:
- More characters. 150 is a healthy starting pool. We will keep adding, particularly characters from less-covered regional traditions and adjacent canons (Buddhist and Jain mythology overlap with Hindu in interesting ways, and figures like Mahavira and the Buddha appear in Hindu Puranic texts as well).
- Native-script aliases. Right now the autocomplete only matches English transliterations. Adding Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, and other native-script aliases means a Hindi or Tamil reader can type “हनुमान” or “ஹனுமான” and have it match. Cheap improvement, high impact for non-English-first players.
- Regional language clue versions. A bigger project. The English we have written is dense; it has to pack a lot into one sentence. Native-language versions composed by writers fluent in those traditions would read better than direct translations of our English. We are watching search-traffic patterns to decide which language to start with.
Things you can do now:
- Suggest a character we missed. Use the Contact page and tell us who and why. Particularly useful: regional figures from areas we under-cover.
- Report a clue error. If a fact looks wrong, send the puzzle date, the character, what you believe is inaccurate, and a source if you have one.
- Compare your streak. We are curious which characters trip people up most. Share screenshots, send messages, or tag @DesiUtils if you cross-post.
Sources
A short version of the dated citations from the game’s Sources block:
- Valmiki, Ramayana: composed approximately 5th to 4th century BCE
- Vyasa, Mahabharata: composed approximately 400 BCE to 400 CE
- Rig Veda: oldest hymns approximately 1500 to 1200 BCE
- Bhagavata Purana: prevailing scholarly consensus approximately 9th to 10th century CE
- Devi Mahatmya (within Markandeya Purana): approximately 5th to 6th century CE
- Sangam literature (Tamil): approximately 3rd century BCE to 3rd century CE
- Tulsidas, Ramcharitmanas: 1574 CE
- Adi Shankaracharya: 8th century CE; commentaries on Upanishads, Brahma Sutras, Bhagavad Gita
The full list of 15 dated sources lives on the game page itself.