About Duotone
Duotone is a free daily word puzzle. Two five-letter words share the same five tiles, and you flip and slide the tiles until both rows spell words.
Where the name came from
A duotone is a picture made with just two colors of ink. Duotone does the same with words: two of them, one in amber and one in teal, laid over each other on a single row of tiles.
How the puzzles are made
Every puzzle starts with two everyday five-letter words chosen from a hand-picked list. Obscure words, offensive words and gloomy words are left out. A computer then tries every possible way to arrange and flip the five tiles (3,840 combinations) to make sure there is exactly one arrangement where both rows are real words. If a pair of words has more than one solution, it's thrown out.
Difficulty comes from decoys. Some word pairs can be rearranged into many other real words on one row, which makes them harder to untangle. Puzzles with few decoys run early in the week, and the trickiest ones are saved for weekends.
What makes it different
- One puzzle a day, the same for everyone. It changes at midnight in your own time zone.
- Race the clock. Three checks, ten seconds each, and a timer to beat.
- Fair by design. Answers are checked on our server and never sent to your browser before you finish, so nobody can peek.
- Free to play. No ads, no paywall.
- No account needed. You can create one if you want your streak on several devices.
Who makes it
Duotone is an independent project made by one puzzle fan, not a large company. Ideas, word suggestions and bug reports are always welcome; see the contact page.