In a couple of weeks Pokédle turns four months old. That is not a long time, but it is long enough that the version of the site you see today has almost nothing in common with the one that went up first. It has been rebuilt, reordered and second-guessed more times than is probably healthy, so it felt like a good moment to write down how it got here.
This is not a roadmap post. It is just the history, in order, including the parts that did not work.
Month one: one game, badly centered
The first version was a single game. A zoomed-in sprite that zoomed out a little with every wrong guess, six tries, and a text box. That was the whole site. There was no header, no footer, no stats, and the guess box did not have autocomplete, so you had to spell Nidoran correctly on the first try or lose a guess to a typo.
It worked well enough that a handful of people played it more than once, which was the only signal needed to keep going. The very next thing added was the cry quiz, because audio felt like the most obviously different way to ask the same question: which Pokémon is this?
The slow pile-up of games
After the cry quiz, games arrived roughly one at a time. A Pokédex entry with the name redacted. A base stat total comparison, which was meant to be simple and turned out to be the hardest one on the site. A shiny quiz where you pick the real recolor out of four fakes. Then the drawing game, which asks you to sketch a Pokémon from memory in sixty seconds and is still the most-played page on the whole site by a wide margin.
Not every idea survived. There was a route quiz for a while, where you were shown six Pokémon and had to name the route they all spawned on. On paper it was fine. In practice almost nobody knew the answer and it felt like a memory test with no way in. It got scrapped and replaced with Spot the Fake Team Member, which shows you a real gym leader or Elite Four team with one impostor slipped in. Same trivia knowledge, much better puzzle.
The most recent addition is Guess the Fusion, where two Pokémon are fused into a single sprite and you have to name both halves. It gives partial credit if you only get one, which turned out to matter a lot for how it feels to play.
Pokémon of the Day
At some point the site needed something that was not another six-guess format. Pokémon of the Day is a multi-stage thing: one Pokémon, and you work through its typing, its height, its weight, its breeding group and a few other properties before the reveal.
That one has been fiddled with more than any other page. The height stage originally accepted anything within half a meter, which meant you could guess wildly and still be right. It is down to a fifth of a meter now. The breeding stage was broken for longer than anyone wants to admit, because the candidate pool was too small and kept producing impossible rounds. The weight stage did not exist at all until a player asked for it.
The mobile rewrite that never really ended
Roughly half of everyone who plays is on a phone, and for a long time the site was clearly built by someone looking at a desktop monitor. You had to scroll down every single time a game loaded, because the header ate the top of the screen. The autocomplete dropdown was miserable to tap, sometimes registering, sometimes not, because it was closing itself the instant your finger touched it.
Both of those are fixed now. The header shrinks once a game is running, the page scrolls itself so the puzzle is centered when it loads, and the suggestion list responds to the press instead of the release. There was also a stretch where the screen jumped around whenever the keyboard opened, which came down to the saved game state loading in a fraction of a second after the first paint. That one took embarrassingly long to work out.
Everything around the games
The games were only ever half of it. Streaks came in July, tracking how many days in a row you have played, with a flame counter next to the logo and a breakdown per game in the side menu. All of it lives on your own device, no account needed.
There is also a guides library now, covering the type chart, gym leader teams, every generation, starters, legendaries and shinies. A daily answers page that computes the day's solutions and walks you through progressive hints before spoiling anything. And this blog, which started as a place to post patch notes and turned into somewhere to write about naming etymology and base stat totals.
The navigation has been reshuffled to keep up. Games are pills at the top, everything else lives in a slide-out menu, and the split exists because the old header had turned into an undifferentiated row of nine links.
Where things actually stand
Four months in: eight daily games, a Pokémon of the Day mode, an unlimited section, streaks, a guides library and a blog. Traffic has grown steadily, most of it from people searching for Pokémon guessing games, and the drawing game continues to be the thing people come back for.
None of this was planned out in advance. Almost every change on this list came from either playing the site and getting annoyed by something, or someone sending an email about it. If there is something you want changed, added or removed, that is still the process. Write to partygooseyt@gmail.com and it will get read.