Palimpsest describes a manuscript page that was written on, scraped clean, and written on again — because parchment was expensive and words abundant. However, under the right light the previous text shows through the new one, and whole lost works have been recovered that way.
The game uses the same mechanism. Today’s sentence is the visible layer. Another sentence is underneath it, and you recover it.
We wanted a game for the literary nerds, so every source sentence is a real line from canonical literature in the public domain — Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Plato, and many more.
Choose letters from the sentence to produce a new, shorter sentence based on the clues. There are endless possibilities, so we have curated a defined set. Spaces of the old sentence do not matter, and the words of your answer need not line up with the words of the line.
Once you finish the main answer, a themed bonus round opens. Sometimes a wildcard appears after the bonus round and they use a stricter rule, where no word of the answer may be hiding inside a single word of the sentence, and no clue is provided.
Take your time and guess as many times as you need — or challenge yourself with hard mode, where less information is given. Share your daily gameplay with friends to battle on time.
Your streak lives in your browser, on your device, so a browser reset will wipe it. You can generate a save code from the bottom of the site and copy it to a new instance. We count page views, and anonymised data on solves, number of guesses and times, so we can adjust the game to keep it fun.