Subwaydle

Subwaydle takes the Wordle format and applies it to the New York City subway. Each day the game hides a real trip made of three trains and two transfers, and you have six guesses to find it. Every guess must be a route the subway map would actually let you ride, and a hint can reveal the trip's start and end stations if you get stuck.

What is Subwaydle?

Subwaydle is a daily puzzle built around New York's subway map instead of a word list. The site hides one trip each day: a sequence of three trains, connected by two transfers, that forms a ride you could really take. You submit a guess as a three-train route, and the game checks it against the subway map rather than a dictionary. A guess only counts if the transfers you picked exist at stations where those lines actually meet, and no station can be traveled through more than once in a single trip. Weekday puzzles draw from 6,835 possible trip combinations based on midday schedules, while weekend puzzles draw from 4,188 combinations based on regular weekend routings.

Feedback follows the familiar Wordle color logic. A train in the correct spot of the route turns green, a train that belongs on the trip but sits in the wrong position turns yellow (the game calls it gold), and a train that is not part of the trip turns gray. Unlike Wordle, the puzzle does not tell you where the trip begins or ends up front. You can ask for a hint that reveals the start and end stations, which turns the puzzle from pure deduction into a test of how well you know the map. The route rules have some subway-specific wrinkles: you may switch from a local line to an express and back to the same local, but not the reverse, and the guess keyboard uses I for the Staten Island Railway, S for the 42nd Street Shuttle, K for the Franklin Avenue Shuttle, and H for the Rockaway Park Shuttle.

Subwaydle was built by Sunny Ng, a New York based software engineer who has said the idea grew out of trivia nights at the New York Transit Museum. The project is open source under the MIT license, written with React, Sass, Semantic UI React, and Mapbox, and the subway route symbols are used with MTA permission. It picked up press coverage from Time Out New York and Patch in February 2022 as part of the wave of Wordle spinoffs. Ng later built versions for other systems himself, including Roundle for the London Underground and a Hong Kong MTR edition, both released in 2022.

There is one puzzle per day and no archive of past puzzles on the site. Instead, the developer's account on X, @subwaydle, posts the previous day's solution along with aggregate player stats. The game is free to play in the browser.

How to play Subwaydle

1. Open Subwaydle at subwaydle.com. The day's puzzle hides a real trip made of three trains connected by two transfers.
2. Submit a guess as three train lines that form a valid, connected ride. The game rejects routes that do not work on the actual map.
3. Read the color feedback: green means that train is in the right position of the route, yellow (gold) means it belongs on the trip but in a different spot, and gray means it is not part of the trip.
4. Use the hint if you get stuck. It reveals the trip's start and end stations, which lets you reason from the map instead of guessing blind.
5. Remember the schedule rules: weekday puzzles follow midday service, and weekend puzzles follow regular weekend routings.
6. Keep refining your route using the feedback until you find the correct three trains, or run out of your six guesses for the day.

Tips and strategy

• Open with a guess that uses lines running through major transfer hubs, since well-connected lines rule in or rule out more of the map at once.
• Take the hint early if you do not recognize the trip. Knowing the start and end stations lets you limit guesses to lines that actually serve those stops.
• No station can be traveled through more than once in a trip, so a route that doubles back will be rejected.
• You can go local to express and back to the same local line, but not express to local and back to the same express, so check which pattern your transfer plan uses.
• Treat yellow tiles as confirmed trains: they belong somewhere on the trip, just not where you put them.
• The keyboard uses stand-in letters for the odd lines: I for the Staten Island Railway, S for the 42nd Street Shuttle, K for the Franklin Avenue Shuttle, and H for the Rockaway Park Shuttle.

Good to know

Category

Geography / transit puzzle

Cost

Free to play

Guesses

6 per day

Daily pool

6,835 weekday trips; 4,188 weekend trips

Archive

None on the site; solutions posted on @subwaydle on X

Creator

Sunny Ng, open source (MIT license)

Launched

Early 2022

Feedback

Wordle-style green, yellow (gold), and gray tiles

Subwaydle FAQ

Is Subwaydle free?

Yes. It is a free, open source web game with no paywall found in research.

How do you play Subwaydle?

Each day the game hides a real NYC subway trip made of three trains and two transfers. You have six guesses, each of which must be a valid route on the actual map, and colored tiles show which trains are correct and in the right position. A hint can reveal the trip's start and end stations.

Does Subwaydle have an archive of past puzzles?

Not on the site itself. The developer's account on X, @subwaydle, posts the previous day's solution and stats instead of hosting a browsable archive.

Is Subwaydle like Wordle?

It borrows Wordle's daily format and color-coded feedback, but instead of guessing letters in a word, you guess subway trains in a real route, and every guess has to be a physically valid trip on the NYC subway map.

Who made Subwaydle?

Sunny Ng, a New York based software engineer, built Subwaydle as an open source project using React, Sass, Semantic UI React, and Mapbox. He later made London and Hong Kong versions as well.