Famous names, places, and titles — the proper-noun puzzle
The answer is a proper noun — a person, place, brand, character, or title — and a category pill tells you which kind. Answers can be multi-word ("first last" names render with a visible gap), and unlike every other mode your guesses don’t need to be dictionary words: any letter string of the right length is accepted.
Three hints are available, each costing 120 points: a Wikipedia-derived clue sentence about the answer, a vowel reveal, and a consonant reveal. The clue consumes one of your six board rows — vowel and consonant reveals appear as rows showing the revealed letter in position.
Win base 1,000, one point per second under the five-minute cap, 200 completion, plus a 100-point bonus per unused guess — the richest guess bonus in the game, because names can be genuinely hard.
Hints subtract 120 each. Taking all three costs 360 points but frequently converts a loss into a win — and a hinted win at ~1,000 points still beats a hintless loss at a few hundred.
Before typing anything, mine the category pill. "Athlete" plus a 6-letter answer with a gap pattern of 2+4 has shockingly few famous candidates. Brainstorm names that FIT THE SHAPE before worrying about letters.
Since guesses don’t need to be real words, you can engineer probes. But famous-name letter distributions differ from dictionary words — A and N are everywhere in names. A first guess built from A, E, N, R, S earns more than a standard opener.
Unique among hints: the Wikipedia clue costs a board row, so its value decays as rows run out. Taken at row two, it converts the puzzle from "guess any name" to "guess THIS person" with four rows to spare. Taken at row five, it leaves no room to use the knowledge.
In a "3 + 5" name, the three-letter word has very few possibilities (BOB, JAY, KIM, LEE, MAX, SAM…). Lock it, and the long word usually falls out of pop-culture memory rather than letter logic.
Every mode ships a fresh daily puzzle at your local midnight — the same words for every player worldwide, with a daily leaderboard per mode. Play today's ProperNoundle puzzle.