# Daily Veil guide: reading the veil order and spending your guesses > How Daily Veil works: one picture a day for the whole world, six guesses, a warmth meter, and six hexagon veils that lift in a deliberate order. Covers guess judging, streaks, catch-up days and how ranks work. Published 2026-10-06 by Glowbox · https://glowbox.dev/guides/daily-veil-guide ## The shape of the game Daily Veil gives everyone on Earth the same hidden picture on the same day. Six frosted hexagon veils cover it. You type one guess at a time; every miss lifts another veil and moves a warmth meter along a five-step scale: **Cold, Cool, Warm, Hot, Got it**. You have **six guesses**. [[game:daily-veil]] There is no timer and no penalty for guessing badly beyond the veils you lose. If you run out of guesses, the answer and the whole picture are revealed anyway. The bank holds **60 puzzles** and runs on a **60-day cycle**. Day one worldwide is a fixed puzzle, the next few days are pinned so the early run stays predictable, and the rest follow a fixed shuffled order. When the cycle comes back round, the second pass runs in a different order. The date changes at **00:00 UTC**, not at your local midnight, so if you are playing late at night the board may already have rolled over. Your very first session opens a short practice round built around a picture of an apple, with suggested guesses to click. It does not count toward anything. ## The veil order is the single most useful thing to know The six hexagons are not revealed in reading order. The game reveals them in a designed sequence: **0, 5, 3, 2, 4, 1**. On the 3-by-2 grid that means the four corners come off first and the two middle tiles come off last. That is not arbitrary. The middle two tiles are where the subject sits. The corners are where the environment sits: sea, mountain, meadow, snow, desert, night sky. So the reveal order hands you the setting first and the answer last, which means your first two guesses should be spent on the scene, not the subject. A useful reading of the sequence: - **Guess 1 wrong** — one more corner, two corners now. - **Guess 2 wrong** — a third corner. - **Guess 3 wrong** — the fourth corner. At this point you know the setting and almost nothing about the subject. - **Guess 4 and 5 wrong** — the middle tiles start filling in. If you have read the corners correctly you are usually narrowing to two or three candidates before the subject ever appears. ## How a guess is judged Each puzzle stores the answer in seven languages plus synonyms, a list of very close words, and a list of loosely related words. Answers and articles are stripped, accents are removed, trailing plurals are dropped, and spacing and punctuation are removed entirely, so "ice cream", "ice-cream" and "IceCream" all compare equal. For answers of five letters or more, being one letter out still counts as correct. Two consequences worth internalising: - **Being more specific never hurts.** If your guess contains a listed answer, that counts. "Red lighthouse" is accepted when the answer is lighthouse. - **Being less specific does not.** The reverse direction is not true, so when you are torn between a broad word and a precise one, type the precise one. Words outside the stored lists are sent to the AI, which judges semantic closeness. That budget is **six AI judgements per game**, cached both on your device and in a shared registry keyed by puzzle and word, so guesses that have already been judged for other players come back instantly and free. After the six are gone, any further unfamiliar word is reported as Cold. Spending those judgements on a single good semantic guess is better than spending them on a scatter of near-misses. ## Streaks, catch-up and the calendar A streak counts **consecutive days solved on the day itself**. Miss a day and it resets. Catch-up days still let you play, but they are marked as catch-up and do not count. The calendar shows the whole month. Days you solved are marked, days you failed are marked, today is marked, and the previous seven days are playable if you missed them. It also tracks your longest streak and the ten achievements, which include solving on the first guess, a seven-day streak, a thirty-day streak, solving a catch-up day, and being in the world's first hundred. An estimate: a run is six short typed guesses plus a couple of seconds of judging, so **roughly two to four minutes** per puzzle. ## After you solve it The result screen shows the picture, the answer, and six hexagons coloured by the warmth of each guess. From there you can ask for an AI comment on how your guesses read, read a short story written about the picture, leave a hint for friends who open your link later, or share a spoiler-free grid of coloured squares. If you solved it on the day and the registry is reachable, you also get your position: world first if you were first anywhere, otherwise your number worldwide and your number inside your own city. The city is derived from your device's time zone, not from anything you share. A solved day also becomes a postcard image you can collect, and the calendar shows how many days you have solved that month against a thirty-day progress bar. That bar is a monthly progress indicator, not the size of the puzzle bank. ## Common sticking points - **"The temperature never moves."** The meter only reports a score from the stored lists or the AI. A word outside them, spent after the six judgements are gone, always reads Cold. - **"I got the scene but not the object."** That is the intended shape of the reveal. Use corners to shortlist, then spend the late guesses on the subject. - **"My friend solved the same day with fewer guesses."** You can compare directly on the result screen without spoilers, and ranks are only recorded for same-day solves. - **"The board changed while I was playing."** You crossed 00:00 UTC. Finish the current puzzle if you like; the new day is a separate entry. - **"Offline."** The puzzle and judging still run, but the shared registry features, including world ranking, will not load, and the result page says ranking appears when you play on Glowbox. ## FAQ **What happens when I use all six guesses?** The game reveals the answer and all six veils at once, and the day is logged as unsolved. It still counts as a played day, and the calendar shows it as a miss. **I missed a day. Is my streak gone?** A streak only survives if you solve a puzzle on the same UTC day it appears. You can still play the last 7 days from the calendar, but catch-up days never count toward the streak. **Why did a reasonable word come back as Cold?** Every puzzle ships with a fixed answer list in seven languages, a list of close words, and a list of warmer associations. Words outside those lists are judged by the AI, and the AI only gets six judgements per game. After that, unknown words are simply reported as Cold. **Do duplicate guesses cost me a guess?** No. Repeating a word you already tried is rejected before it is judged, so you can retype it without spending one of your six. **Why is there no world ranking for me?** Ranks come from the shared registry and only appear when you play through Glowbox. The result page says so plainly instead of showing an empty leaderboard. ## Games in this article - [Daily Veil](https://glowbox.dev/game/daily-veil): One picture, one world, six guesses: every wrong guess lifts a frosted hex veil and reveals part of the answer.