There is a new game on Pokédle and it is called Guess the Fusion. The idea is simple to explain and surprisingly hard to do. We take two different Pokémon, fuse them into a single sprite, and show you the result. Your job is to figure out which two Pokémon went into it. One of them is the head, the other is the body.
If you have spent any time online in the last decade you have probably seen these fusions. Pikachu with a Charizard head, a Gengar with Snorlax feet, that kind of thing. They started as fan art and eventually got turned into the Pokémon Infinite Fusion project, which generates a sprite for basically every combination you can think of. That is the same style of sprite we are using here.
How the game works
Each run is eight rounds long. Every round shows you one fused sprite. There are two text boxes below it, one for the head Pokémon and one for the body Pokémon. Both boxes have autocomplete, so you can start typing a name and pick it from the list.
Scoring is done with partial credit. You get half a point for naming the head correctly and half a point for naming the body correctly, so a perfect round is one full point. If you only recognize one half of the fusion, you still walk away with something. Over eight rounds the best possible score is eight points.
There is a daily run that is the same for everyone, and an unlimited mode if you want to keep going. The daily set resets at midnight, so you and a friend can compare the exact same eight fusions.
Why it is harder than it looks
A fusion takes the color palette and body shape from one Pokémon and the head and face from another. The tricky part is that the fusion blends them, so a familiar silhouette gets a color scheme you do not expect, or a face you know sits on a body that throws you off completely.
Some fusions are instantly readable. If you see Charizard's head you will know it in a fraction of a second. Others hide the clues well. A rounded body could be a dozen different Pokémon once it gets recolored, and that is where the guessing turns into real deduction. You start looking at ears, tails, and the little details instead of the overall shape.
Coverage
The fusion set covers a large chunk of the National Pokédex, so you will see Pokémon from the early generations right through to later ones. Kanto favorites show up a lot, but do not get comfortable, because there are plenty of fusions built from Pokémon you might not have thought about in years.
We map every fusion sprite back to the real National Pokédex numbers behind the scenes, so the answers always line up with the Pokémon you actually know, not some internal numbering that would only confuse things.
Go try it
Guess the Fusion is live now in the games list, and there is a full guide if you want tips on reading the sprites before you dive in. It fits on mobile and desktop, so you can play it wherever you usually play the daily games.
If you have thoughts on the game, more rounds, harder fusions, a streak counter, anything, we would love to hear them. Send us a note and tell us what you want next.
Tactics that actually help
Solve the head before the body. The head carries the face, the ears, the horns and the mouth shape, which are the features your memory stores most strongly, and getting it right immediately narrows the body to whatever is left. Working the other way around is much harder, because a recolored body shape can plausibly belong to a dozen Pokémon.
Ignore the colors on the first pass. The palette comes from the body Pokémon, so a green Charizard head is still a Charizard head and the green is telling you about the other half of the answer, not this one. People lose rounds by trusting color over shape, because color is the one feature the fusion deliberately swaps.
Look for hard silhouette features, the parts a fusion cannot smooth away. Wings, a single horn, a flame or bulb on the back, a shell, a tail with a distinct shape. One of those narrows the pool to a handful of species. Rounded, limbless, featureless bodies are the genuinely hard rounds and the ones worth spending your remaining guesses on.
Type is a legitimate clue too. Fusion palettes usually carry the body's type colors along with its shape, so a body that has gone blue and finned is a Water Pokémon even if you cannot name it yet. And remember that partial credit exists: getting one half right scores, so if you are confident about the head, lock that in rather than holding out for a perfect answer.