Saturday, August 8, 2026The daily WNBA puzzle
How to Play

Stumped is a set of free daily WNBA games you play right in your browser — no account, no download. Here is how each one works, and how to get good at it.

The Daily Puzzle

You are given 16 tiles. Hidden among them are four groups of four that share a category — players on the same team, holders of a particular record, members of a draft class, and so on. Pick the four you think belong together and hit Submit.

Guess a group correctly and it locks in, its category revealed. Guess wrong and you take a mistake; four mistakes ends the game. The four categories are color-coded by difficulty, from blue (easiest) through green and orange to red (hardest).

The challenge is rarely the category itself — it is the overlaps. Some tiles look like they could sit in two or three groups at once, and the puzzle is built so the obvious grouping is often a trap.

A few habits that help:

  • Start with the group you are most certain of, not the one you notice first.
  • Before submitting, ask what each tile could also belong to — decoys are placed on purpose.
  • Every tile belongs to exactly one group, so you can solve the last, hardest category by elimination.
  • Stuck? A hint reveals a clue to the easiest unsolved category, and Shuffle rearranges the board to break a fixed way of seeing it.

Pace

Pace is a higher-or-lower streak game. You are shown two players and one stat; your job is to say whether the second player lands higher or lower than the first. Keep guessing correctly to build a streak.

There are two modes. This Season compares each player's projected season total in a stat — points, rebounds, assists or threes — using our own projection model. Career compares all-time career totals across current and former players, over a wider set of stats including steals, blocks, games and minutes.

The projected numbers are not just today's averages — they account for recent form, workload and injuries. If you want to know how a projection is built, see How the projections work. Injury status is shown on the card, which is often the tell on a close call.

Decipher

Decipher is a guess-the-player game. You are given a mystery player's real per-game averages and a blacked-out silhouette, and you have six guesses to name her.

Every guess must be a real WNBA player, and each one you submit is compared against the answer across six attributes — conference, position, height, jersey number, draft year and college. A green match means you nailed that attribute; amber means you are close; and arrows point you toward the answer on the numeric fields. A wrong guess that is not a valid player does not cost you a turn.

Use the comparisons to triangulate. One guess can tell you the conference, rule out a position, and put you in the right draft era — turning a blind guess into a short list.

Streaks and sharing

Your daily-puzzle streak and completed-puzzle history, along with your Pace best streak, are saved in your browser's local storage — never on our servers. When you finish, share your result: the daily puzzle makes a spoiler-free emoji grid, while Pace and Decipher share a spoiler-free result card. Tag it with #StumpedWNBA.