Hollywoodle

Hollywoodle hands you two actors and asks you to link them through a chain of shared movies and co-stars. It borrows its daily format from Wordle but replaces letter guessing with real film trivia, so the puzzle changes every day instead of testing the same mechanic on a fixed word list. The goal is not just to find any path between the two actors, but to find it in as few moves as possible.

What is Hollywoodle?

Hollywoodle is built on the old party-game idea of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where any actor can supposedly be linked to any other through a short chain of shared films. The game turns that idea into a daily puzzle: you are given a start actor and an end actor, and you guess your way through the connecting movies and co-stars one step at a time. Each guess is checked against real filmographies, using data from The Movie Database (TMDB), so the connections are grounded in actual casting history rather than invented trivia.

What separates Hollywoodle from most other movie-themed dle games is that it is not a single-answer guessing game. Games branded as Moviedle typically show you a poster, a blurred still, or a short clip and ask you to name one film. Hollywoodle instead asks you to build a path, which means there can be multiple valid routes between the same two actors, and part of the challenge is finding a short one rather than just a correct one.

Scoring works on a moves system rather than a fixed number of attempts. A correct link in the chain costs one move, a guess that only partly connects (for example naming a film that features the target actor but does not yet complete the chain) costs two moves, and a wrong guess costs three. A hint costs just one move, the same as a correct guess, so asking for help is far cheaper than guessing blindly. Your final result also records your degrees of separation, the number of correctly guessed films connecting the two actors, following the original rules of the Kevin Bacon game.

The game was conceived by Alex Jaloza and built by developer Avraham Mamenko, whose repository notes it was put together in March 2022 to coincide with that year's Academy Awards. It runs on a MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) and is open source under an MIT license. It is free to play, and past daily actor pairs are reachable through an archive, so missing a day does not mean losing access to that puzzle for good.

How to play Hollywoodle

1. Open Hollywoodle at hollywoodle.vercel.app.
2. Look at the two actors you are given for the day, one as your starting point and one as the target.
3. Guess a movie or actor that connects toward the target, one step at a time.
4. Watch how each guess is scored: a correct link costs one move, a partial connection costs two, and a wrong guess costs three.
5. Use a hint if you get stuck; it costs only one move.
6. Keep chaining guesses until you reach the target actor, then check your degrees of separation and total move count.

Tips and strategy

• Think about prolific, heavily cast actors first, since they tend to sit in the middle of the shortest chains between two people.
• Before guessing, mentally run through each actor's most famous ensemble films, since those tend to hold the most co-star connections.
• Remember that a wrong guess costs three moves while a partial connection only costs two, so a half-right guess is cheaper than a total miss.
• A hint costs just one move, the same as a correct answer, so taking one when you are stuck is much cheaper than burning three moves on a wrong guess.
• Do not just aim to finish the chain, aim to finish it in as few moves as possible, since the game scores both your total moves and your degrees of separation.
• If you get stuck on a specific actor, try thinking of the genres or decades they worked in rather than their single most famous role.

Good to know

Category

Movies and TV

Resets

Daily, with a new pair of actors each day

Cost

Free to play

Guesses

No fixed guess cap, scored by a moves system instead

Modes

One daily actor-connection puzzle

Archive

Yes, past daily puzzles are accessible

Creator

Concept by Alex Jaloza, built by Avraham Mamenko

Launched

March 2022

Hollywoodle FAQ

Is Hollywoodle free to play?

Yes. Hollywoodle is a free browser game with nothing to buy, and the project itself is open source under an MIT license.

How do you play Hollywoodle?

You are given two actors and need to connect them through a chain of shared movies and co-stars, guessing one link at a time. Correct guesses cost fewer moves than wrong or partial ones, and the aim is to reach the second actor using as few moves as possible.

When does Hollywoodle reset, and can I play past puzzles?

A new actor pair is posted daily, and the project's documentation confirms that archived puzzles are accessible, so you can go back and play earlier days.

Is Hollywoodle like Wordle?

It borrows Wordle's daily puzzle format, one new challenge per day, but the guessing itself is movie trivia rather than letters. It is closer to a daily version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game than to word guessing.

Who made Hollywoodle?

The concept came from Alex Jaloza, and the game was built by developer Avraham Mamenko, using movie and actor data from The Movie Database (TMDB).