How to Play Hieroglyph: Decode Sentences Drawn in Pictures

Hieroglyph draws a sentence as a row of pictures, one picture per word, and asks you to type it back. Five sentences make a game, and you have ten tries for the whole thing - not ten per sentence. A wrong guess anywhere costs the same.

The pleasure of it is the same as a rebus: the picture is never the word, it is a hint towards the word, and the sentence structure does most of the disambiguating. A picture that could be twenty things narrows to one as soon as you work out where it sits in the sentence.

Each word gets its own input box sized to that word's length, with a box per letter, so you always know how long the answer is. Words you already got right stay highlighted after a failed guess, so progress is never lost.

How to play Hieroglyph

1. Choose Daily - the same game for everybody in your timezone all day - or Quick for a fresh one. The two draw from completely separate sentence banks, so grinding quick games cannot spoil your daily.
2. Press Start. The clock begins now.
3. Each sentence appears as a row of pictures, one per word. Type your answer into the per-word inputs; each is sized to that word's letter count.
4. Submit the sentence. If it is wrong, the words you did get right stay highlighted and you lose one of your ten tries.
5. The ten tries cover all five sentences. Run out and the game ends with a score of zero, however fast you were.
6. Decode all five and you win the cup. Scoring is fifty points per unused try, plus a time bonus of up to five hundred - full at thirty seconds or under, decaying to nothing at three minutes - for a maximum of a thousand.

Strategy and tips

• Fill in the words you are sure of first and leave the rest blank. The letter counts on the remaining boxes plus the grammar of what you have already written often force the answer.
• Use the letter boxes as a constraint, not decoration. A three-letter word between two nouns is "the", "and", "for" or "his" far more often than anything clever.
• Read the pictures as sounds as well as things. Rebus logic is alive here: a picture may be pointing at a homophone rather than at its own meaning.
• Do not submit to test a single word. Every submission costs a try out of ten for the whole game, so guess only when the whole sentence is plausible.
• The time bonus is full at thirty seconds and gone at three minutes, but a failed game scores zero regardless. Accuracy is worth vastly more than speed - never burn a try to save fifteen seconds.
• It plays well with two people. One reads the pictures aloud while the other types, and the disagreements are where the answers come from.

What makes Hieroglyph different

Most picture-word puzzles show you one rebus at a time. Hieroglyph gives you a whole sentence, which means grammar becomes a solving tool - you can deduce a word you cannot read from the shape of the sentence around it.

Sharing one budget of ten tries across all five sentences is the design decision that gives it tension. Per-sentence tries would let you brute-force each one in isolation; a shared budget makes an early careless guess something you feel four sentences later.

The Daily and Quick banks are deliberately disjoint - two hundred sentences reserved for the daily, three hundred for quick play - so there is no way to farm quick games until the daily turns up. That is a rule most daily puzzles quietly get wrong.

And unlike the medal games here, there is one award tier. You either decode everything and get the cup, or you do not. It suits a puzzle that is about a single, definite answer.

Frequently asked questions

More to read

• Games like Wordle: daily puzzles worth a bookmark: One puzzle a day, the same for everybody, done in five minutes. Here is what actually kept working after the clones died.
• Free daily puzzle games to play in your browser: A shortlist by puzzle type - word, logic, colour, memory - of dailies that take five minutes and are the same for everyone.