How to Play Angledle

The rules in brief

A fresh angle appears at 6:00 AM local time each day, somewhere between 1° and 359°. Two rays meet at a point and form a shape. The task: name the exact degree. 6 tries. No fractional answers, no half-degrees.

Each guess returns two pieces of feedback: a temperature hint showing how far off the guess was, and an arrow pointing toward the real value. That's one round.

What the temperature hints mean

It's the hot-and-cold game with concrete numbers behind it. A closer guess earns a warmer word. The thresholds:

• So close! Within 5°. Combined with the arrow, that leaves at most 5 candidates.
• Hot — within 15°. The right neighborhood. A small nudge is enough.
• Warm — within 30°. Closer than nothing, not there yet. A 15° step usually makes sense.
• Cold — more than 30° off. A larger move pays off here: 40 to 50 in the arrow's direction.

The arrow is straightforward. ⬆️ means the real angle is larger than the guess. ⬇️ means it's smaller. Combine the word with the arrow to fence off a tight strip of the dial for the next guess.

A sample round

Suppose the answer is 137°. A plausible sequence of guesses:

1. 90°. A weak opener. Returns “Cold ⬆️”. The real angle is past 120 somewhere. Useful, barely.
2. 150°. Returns “Hot ⬇️”. Within 15, but lower than 150. The window is now 135 through 149.
3. 135°. Testing the low edge of the window. “So close! ⬆️” lights up. Five candidates remain: 136, 137, 138, 139, 140.
4. 137°. A coin-flip pick from the five. It lands on guess 4.

Each guess sliced the surviving range roughly in half. That's the core technique. The 90° opener was the weak link; 180° would have been more efficient, for reasons covered below. To practice the routine on past puzzles, the archive replays any daily back to January 2022.

Reading the shape before typing

A second or two of study beats a quick stab. The familiar references cover the easy cases: 90° looks like an L, 45° is half of that, 60° is a triangle corner. The category that trips up most players is reflex, so it gets the most attention here.

Reflex angles span 181° to 359°, and the trick is that the marked arc sits on the outside of where the eye lands first. The smaller opening between the rays might look like 70°, while the marked angle is the long way around at 290°. Players lose whole rounds to that flip.

Quick fix: subtract the obvious-looking smaller angle from 360. If the narrow opening reads as 50, the marked angle is probably 310. The rays look almost closed and the arc sweeps the long route around the vertex. Once that lands, reflex angles become tractable.

Acute angles are easier. A 1 o'clock clock-hand gap is roughly 30°, a 2 o'clock gap is 60°, and anything that looks like a thin pizza slice is under 45. Obtuse sits between “wider than a square corner” and “almost flat”; 135° is a useful anchor in the middle. Straight angles at exactly 180° are the easiest case: if it reads as a flat line, type 180.

Opening guesses

180° is a sharper opener than 90°. It instantly reveals whether the answer is reflex, narrowing the search to 181° to 359° on a single guess. Opening at 90° only halves the non-reflex side and conveys little when the answer lives past 180°.

• Open at 180°. It cleanly splits the dial into “acute or obtuse” versus “reflex” with one hint.
• Bisect what's left. After each hint, aim at the middle of the surviving range. Unglamorous, and usually optimal.
• Memorize anchor angles. Knowing 30°, 45°, 60°, 120°, 150°, and 270° by sight is enough for a passable first guess in seconds.
• Convert “So close!” carefully. A 5° window plus an arrow leaves at most five candidates. On guess 4 or 5, that's effectively a free win.
• Take time on guess 6. Walk back through every hint. The accumulated information usually traps the answer inside a 2-to-3-degree gap. Pick the median and submit.

Skill versus luck

Players who finish in 3 or 4 most days aren't lucky. They've trained their eye and they treat each guess as a question that roughly halves the dial. After a few hundred puzzles, the first guess tends to land inside 10° without conscious effort, and bisection takes over from move 2 onward.

That accuracy comes from repetition. For extra practice without waiting for the next daily reset, Unlimited mode serves back-to-back rounds. It's the fastest route to a steadier eye.