A friend's emoji puzzle
4 guesses. A wrong guess unlocks the next hint.
Solved!
The answer:
Pick your own emojis and send a puzzle back. Or play today's Stay Dank puzzle, the same for everyone.
This puzzle link is broken
The part of the link after the # is incomplete or has been changed, so the puzzle cannot be played. This usually happens when a chat app cuts a long link short, or when only part of it was copied. Ask your friend to copy the whole link again.
Make an emoji puzzle for a friend
Pick the emojis, type the answer, and send the link. Your friend plays it with the same rules as the daily game: four guesses, and a new hint after each miss.
How the link works
The whole puzzle travels inside the link, after the #. Browsers never send that part of an address to a web server, so the puzzle is not uploaded or stored anywhere. There is no database of player puzzles. A link works for as long as you keep it, and nobody can take it down.
Your friend's guesses are checked the same way as in the daily game. Capitals, accents, punctuation, spaces and a leading “the”, “a” or “an” are ignored, and “&” counts as “and”. It does not do fuzzy matching, so list common other spellings or wordings in box 3. For “Winnie the Pooh” you might add “Pooh” and “Winnie the Pooh Bear”. Digits and words are different to the checker, so for a title with a number list both, such as “Toy Story 2” and “Toy Story two”.
- Hint 1 is your one-line hint, if you wrote one.
- Hint 2 comes after the first wrong guess. It gives the number of words and the letters in each, worked out from your answer, for example “2 words, with 4 · 4 letters”.
- Hint 3 comes after the second wrong guess and shows how the answer starts, as in the daily game.
- After four misses, or on a solve, the answer is shown, followed by a Make one back button.
How hidden is the answer?
The answer is not written in the link. The link holds a random 16-byte salt and a SHA-256 hash of the salt plus each accepted answer, shortened to its first 128 bits. Each guess is tidied, hashed the same way in the browser and compared with those hashes. So that the answer can be shown at the end, the link also carries a scrambled copy: the answer's bytes are XORed with bytes worked out from the salt, then encoded. Every link gets a new salt, so the same answer looks different each time.
This stops a glance from spoiling it, not a determined cheat. Anyone who reads this page's code can unscramble the copy in a minute, and a short answer can be found by trying guesses against the hash. It is meant for friends who want to play fair, not to protect a secret.
What the maker refuses
Stay Dank is family-friendly, and player puzzles follow the same rule as the daily ones. The maker refuses an answer, spelling or hint with a word from the site's blocklist, such as swear words, alcohol, drugs and violence. It also refuses emojis such as 🍺, 🔫 and 💀. The daily puzzle banks are tested against this same list. A link that was edited by hand to get past the list will not play.
Tips for a good puzzle
- Use one emoji per word, or one for a word that sounds like it: 👁️ for “I”, 🐝 for “be”, 🌊 for “sea”. ⭐🐟 reads as “starfish”. Small words like “the” and “of” usually get no emoji.
- Emojis look a little different on iPhone, Android and Windows, and a very new emoji can show as a blank box on an older phone. Every emoji in the grid dates from 2015 or earlier, so it shows on nearly every phone and computer in use.
- Press Try it before you send: you play the link yourself, and your browser's Back button brings you back to the maker with your puzzle still filled in.
Nothing is stored or sent
The maker and the player run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded or saved, not even in this browser. Playing a friend's puzzle never touches your daily or Film night streak and stats, and reloading a friend's puzzle starts it again. The site's own visit counter records that this page was opened, but never the part of the link after the #.