How to play CYBERPUNKDLE: rules, modes and strategy

A new set of puzzles goes live once a day, at the same moment for every player in the world. The answer does not depend on your language: someone playing in Japanese and someone playing in Portuguese are looking for the same character, which makes it easy to compare results with friends abroad.

Your progress is saved in your browser. If you close the tab halfway through, your guesses will still be there when you come back the same day. When you finish, a countdown shows how long you have to wait for the next puzzle.

Each mode has its own answer and its own statistics, so you can play a single mode every day or all six.

• Classic: find the character of the day from a grid of seven attributes. Unlimited guesses.
• Portrait: a blurred portrait sharpens with every guess. Unlimited guesses.
• Emoji: a few emojis describe the character. Eight guesses.
• Quote: name the character who said a line from the game. Eight guesses.
• Weapon: name the owner of a signature weapon or piece of cyberware. Eight guesses.
• Arsenal: name the iconic weapon shown in a photo. Eight guesses.

In the modes limited to eight guesses, the answer is revealed if you run out of attempts, so you never end the day without knowing who it was.

Classic mode is the heart of the game. Each guess is compared with the answer on seven attributes:

• Gender: male, female, or AI for the rare non-human characters.
• Status: alive, deceased, or engram for a mind that survives as digital data, like Johnny Silverhand on the Relic.
• Affiliation: the corporation, gang, nomad clan or organisation the character belongs to, or Independent.
• Role: their trade in Night City, using the classes of the Cyberpunk universe (Solo, Netrunner, Techie, Fixer, Nomad, Corpo, Rockerboy, Medtech, Lawman, Media…). Many characters have several roles.
• Appearance: whether the character comes from the base game or from the Phantom Liberty expansion.
• Age: their age in 2077, when it is documented.
• District: the part of Night City where you mostly deal with them: Watson, Westbrook, Heywood, City Center, Santo Domingo, Pacifica, Dogtown, or the Badlands outside the city.

Each cell then takes a colour:

• Green: the value is exactly the same as the answer’s.
• Orange: close. For affiliation, both belong to the same camp: corporate powers (Arasaka, Militech, NUSA) or gangs (Maelstrom, Tyger Claws, Voodoo Boys, Moxes, Barghest). For role, the two characters share at least one role but not all of them. For age, the gap is five years or less.
• Red: no match.

Age cells also show an arrow: ▲ means the answer is older than your guess, ▼ means younger. A cell marked “unknown” is a value the game never gives. It is never counted as a match, even against another “unknown”, so treat those cells as no information at all.

Your first guess in Classic mode is blind, so the smart move is to pick a character whose attributes split the roster into many small groups. We tested every possible first guess against every possible answer, with the same rules as the game. The table shows how many characters are still possible on average after that first guess, and how many remain in the worst case.

At the other end of the scale, Delamain is the worst opener: the profile is so unusual that the grid leaves 12.8 candidates on average.

From the second guess onwards, a few habits help:

• Settle the affiliation first. Once the cell turns green, stay in that faction; if it turns orange, stay in the same camp.
• Use roles to separate look-alikes. Characters from the same clan often share everything except one role, and the orange role cell is what tells them apart.
• Do not build your plan around age: only 17 of the 43 characters have a documented age.
• The district column is often decisive in the late game, because most factions are tied to one part of the city.

The other character modes give you a single clue and only tell you whether a guess is right or wrong. Portrait is the most forgiving: the picture improves with every attempt and guesses are unlimited. Emoji, Quote and Weapon allow eight guesses in the daily challenge.

In these modes, eliminate by category before naming anyone. Ask yourself which faction the clue points to, then which trade, then which part of the story. Knowing the cast helps a lot, and the character database is the quickest way to refresh your memory.

Arsenal mode is about objects rather than people. The photo shows one of the game’s iconic weapons and you have eight guesses to name it. Start by working out the family from the silhouette, then think about which iconic version of that weapon you have come across. The iconic weapons page sorts them all by type, with their class and manufacturer.

Every mode also has an Infinite button that starts a random practice puzzle. Practice games have no guess limit, do not count in your statistics and can be replayed as often as you like.

Your statistics track, for each mode, the number of daily puzzles played, your win rate, your current streak and your best streak, plus how many guesses your wins took. They are stored only in your browser: clearing your site data resets them, and they do not follow you to another device.

When you finish a daily puzzle, the Copy result button puts a spoiler-free summary on your clipboard: the puzzle number, your score and a grid of coloured squares, ready to paste into a chat.

The answer is never sent to your browser before the puzzle ends, and the blurred portraits are generated on the server, so there is nothing to peek at in the page. The fun is in the deduction. If you are stuck, the character database and the iconic weapons page are there to jog your memory without giving the answer away.