CTA Wordle: a daily Chicago L guessing game, out September 24

Chicago is getting a CTA Wordle. DailyMetro's Chicago edition launches on September 24, 2026, with one mystery L station to find every day, and it's already playable in early access at dailymetro.live/chicago.

DailyMetro started as a Paris metro game that got out of hand (in a good way: it went viral, then started growing city by city, seven cities live today and the rest arriving through mid-October, 21 in all). Chicago has been one of the most requested American cities since the start, and the L deserves it. A system where the lines are just colors and half of downtown is named after the loop the trains make around it is basically pre-designed for a guessing game.

How it works

Each day, one mystery station. Type any station as a guess and the game compares it to the answer across a row of clues:

• Lines: which colors your guess shares with the mystery station.
• Direction: a compass arrow pointing from your guess toward the answer.
• Name length: whether the answer's name is longer or shorter than your guess.
• Area: whether you're in the right part of the city.

There's no cap on guesses. You keep narrowing until the row turns green, and the fewer tries you take, the more you score. A harder Connaisseur mode swaps the name and area clues for opening year and annual ridership, which on a system this old is a real test. There's also a Map mode where the station sits marked on an empty map and every miss reveals another layer: line shapes first, then colors, then streets, then the full network.

The L, in the numbers the game runs on

The Chicago dataset covers 144 stations across all eight color lines. The Red and Blue lines are the biggest pools at 33 stations each, which fits: they're the two that run all night. At the other end sits the Yellow line with exactly three stations (Howard, Oakton-Skokie, Dempster-Skokie), so a Yellow guess either solves your day instantly or wastes a turn in style.

Sixteen stations in the data sit in the Loop itself, which makes downtown guesses dense and informative: Clark/Lake, State/Lake, Adams/Wabash and their neighbors are all a couple hundred meters apart, so the direction arrow does serious work there. The oldest station in the set is 35th-Bronzeville-IIT on the Green line, opened in 1892, back when the South Side Elevated was steam-powered. The busiest is Lake, on the Red line subway under State Street.

If you'd rather study before launch day, the Chicago explorer has a reference page for every line and station, built from the same dataset.

September 24, and early access now

Launch is Thursday, September 24, 2026, which becomes Day 1 for Chicago. The edition is fully playable before then at /chicago: same daily station, same scoring, it just isn't in the city picker yet. If you start during early access, your streak and stats carry into launch.

Free, no account, browser only. The station resets at midnight Chicago time.