Puzzle archive

Every Musicianle board that has already been played, with its answer and the full discography it was built from. A new one is added here every day, the morning after it runs.

Each board hides one musician behind their own release history: the years, the release types and the genres stay visible while the titles are masked. These pages show the finished board, so nothing here spoils a puzzle that is still live. Play today's board or read how a board works.

What the archive is for

Three uses, and they pull in different directions. Someone who played today and gave up wants one answer and nothing else. Someone who found the game late wants to see whether the boards are worth their time. And anyone curious about how the puzzles are chosen can read a few months of them and see the range: how often a board is a household name against a musician you half remember, how many releases a typical career has, and how much a genre column gives away before a single guess is spent.

How a board is built

Every board starts from one musician's real release history. The release years, the formats and the genres are shown exactly as the data has them; only the titles are hidden. Nothing is invented to make a puzzle harder, and nothing is trimmed to make one easier, so a career with two records is a short board and a career with twenty is a long one. That is why difficulty varies more than it would in a game with a fixed shape: the shape is the musician's, not ours.

The difficulty label in the table is our estimate before anyone played, based on how widely read the musician is rather than on how the board turned out. It is a guess about recognition, and the archive is the honest record of when that guess was wrong.

Measured against 210 recorded plays, that guess ranks the three tiers correctly and gets the rate wrong, and the reason is that the label never looks at the genre column. The hardest boards so far has the numbers, board by board.

Spoilers

Nothing on this page can spoil a live board. A puzzle is only published here once it has finished running, so the most recent entry is always yesterday at the earliest. Today's board and every future one are withheld by the same rule, in the pages, the sitemap and the API alike.

Every board so far