Daily Brains · one hidden picture, six guesses, fewer pixels = more points.
Pixel Peek is the picture puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). Each day hides one picture, the same for every player, behind heavy pixelation: it opens as a 4×4 grid of averaged colour blocks. Every wrong guess or skip decrypts it to a finer grid, and you have six guesses to name it. The fewer pixels you needed, the higher your score.
STORY & LORE
The picture book
There are 440 pictures across 13 categories (animals, food & drink, nature & sky, around the house, gadgets, getting around, places & buildings, sport & games, music & art, clothes & accessories, tools & science, signs & symbols, spooky & fantastic). Each one is an emoji drawn by the player's own device font onto a canvas, cropped to its outline and averaged into blocks, so the art looks a little different on every phone. Only Unicode 12 or older emoji are used, with no flags and no people.
Daily schedule
The book is shuffled once per cycle with a fixed seed, so the first 440 puzzles never repeat a picture and the same picture never falls on two days in a row across cycles. If a device cannot draw the day's emoji, it gets a stand-in picture and says so on the results screen.
HOW IT PLAYS
Decrypting
The picture sharpens through six resolutions: 4, 6, 9, 14, 22 and 40 blocks across. Each change plays a decrypt wave: the new, finer blocks flicker through static and lock in from the top-left under a rolling scanline. The full picture is shown when the day ends, win or lose.
Guessing
Type a guess and pick from the type-ahead, which searches every answer and alias. Matching ignores case, spaces and punctuation, accepts plurals and common alternative names (aubergine/eggplant, lorry/truck), and forgives small typos. A guess that isn't on the list is refused without costing a guess. A wrong guess from the right category shows yellow; after three misses the category appears as a hint. Skip spends a guess to sharpen the picture. Keyboard: type anywhere, arrow keys pick a suggestion, Tab completes, Enter guesses.
Scoring
Cracking it on guess 1 (from 16 pixels) scores 600, then 500, 400, 300, 200 and 100 for guesses 2 to 6. Missing all six scores 0 and resets the streak. The share card shows a square per guess (🟩 right, 🟨 right category, 🟥 wrong, ⬜ skipped, ⬛ unused) and how many pixels you cracked it from.
RESOLUTIONS AND POINTS
| Guess | Grid | Pixels | Points if right |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4×4 | 16 | 600 |
| 2 | 6×6 | 36 | 500 |
| 3 | 9×9 | 81 | 400 |
| 4 | 14×14 | 196 | 300 |
| 5 | 22×22 | 484 | 200 |
| 6 | 40×40 | 1,600 | 100 |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Crack the picture | 15 Tickets |
| Crack it on the first guess (perfect) | +25 Tickets |
| Signal Found (first crack) | 🔓 Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Sixteen Pixels (first-guess crack) | 🔍 Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Sharp Eyes (3-day streak) | 🔥 Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Codebreaker (7-day streak) | 🗝️ Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Eagle Eye (30-day streak) | 🦅 Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch version in Daily Brains.
- 440-picture book of device-drawn emoji, six decrypt stages from 4×4 to 40×40, animated block-subdivision reveal.
- Type-ahead guessing with aliases, plurals and typo tolerance; category colour and hint.
- Streaks, statistics with guess distribution, share card and cloud-mirrored progress.