What is city Wordle?
A free daily guessing game where the hidden answer is a real city rather than a five-letter word. The game is called PassportQ, and players tend to describe the format as a city Wordle: one shared puzzle a day, five guesses, and an emoji grid you can paste anywhere without spoiling it.
How to play
- Start from temperature and population. Both are visible before your first guess, which already rules out whole climate bands.
- Guess any city. Autocomplete covers thousands worldwide, so open with somewhere you know well.
- Read the distance and direction. Each guess reports how far the real city is and which way to head.
- Use the unlocked clue. Misses reveal elevation, then local time, then the landscape, then the airlines that fly there.
- Solve in five, then share. Copy the emoji grid to your group chat without giving the answer away.
What a round actually looks like
Say the hidden city is Quito. Before guessing you can already see a high around 19C and a population in the low millions, which is mild rather than tropical and rules out the mega-cities. Guess 1: London. The distance clue points thousands of kilometres south-west, and elevation unlocks at over 2,800 metres, so you are somewhere mountainous rather than coastal. Guess 2: Bogota, much closer, and the local time clue confirms the Americas. Guess 3: Quito. No memorised trivia, just a handful of facts that each cut the map down.
City Wordle vs. the original Wordle
The daily rhythm is the same: one puzzle everyone shares, a fixed number of guesses, a spoiler-free grid at the end. What changes is what a guess returns. Wordle answers in letter colours; a city Wordle answers in geography, how far you are, which direction to go, and what the place is actually like to stand in. That makes it a game about how the world is laid out rather than about vocabulary, which is why it suits travellers and map people. If you would rather narrow the whole world down instead of guessing a single city, Mapfold folds the map with yes-or-no questions, and other Worldle-style geography games use the same daily format.
Frequently asked questions
What is a city Wordle?
A daily guessing game with Wordle's rhythm, one puzzle a day, the same answer for everyone, and a spoiler-free result grid to share, where the hidden answer is a real city instead of a five-letter word. On FlightQ that game is PassportQ: five guesses, with a new clue about the city after each miss.
How do the clues work?
The typical high temperature and the population are on screen from the start. Every wrong guess then unlocks the next fact: elevation, then local time, then the surrounding landscape, and finally the airlines that serve the city. Each guess also reports the distance and compass direction to the answer, so a miss still narrows the map.
How many guesses do I get?
Five. Temperature and elevation together usually rule out most of a continent, so a lot of solves land on the third or fourth guess.
Do I need to know capital cities?
No. The clues are geographic rather than trivia-based, so reasoning from climate, altitude, and distance gets you there without memorising a list. Guessing any large city you know is a perfectly good opening move.
Is it free, and do I need an account?
Free, and no account required. An account syncs your streak and stats across devices; Premium adds unlimited practice, advanced stats, and global comparisons.
How is this different from Worldle?
Worldle shows you a country's silhouette and grades distance and direction to it. A city Wordle hides a specific city and feeds you what living there is like, climate, elevation, time zone, so it rewards a feel for how places actually differ rather than recognising map outlines.
Can I play past puzzles?
Yes. The archive holds every previous day and is free to play, so a missed day is not a lost day.
Is there more than one city game?
Yes. PassportQ is the Wordle-shaped one. CityQ gives you a 3x3 grid of categories to fill and scores you on how rare your answers are, Strata reveals a city's terrain one layer at a time, and Mapfold narrows the whole world map down with yes-or-no questions.