DC Metro Wordle: guess the WMATA station of the day

If you searched for a DC Metro Wordle, this is it: DailyMetro's Washington edition picks one mystery WMATA station every day, and you find it by guessing. Each guess compares your station to the answer, the clues pile up, and the fewer tries you need, the more you score. Free, in the browser, resets at midnight Eastern.

How the daily puzzle works

Type any station. The game answers with a row of clues: which lines your guess shares with the mystery station, a compass arrow pointing toward it, whether the answer's name is longer or shorter, and whether you're in the right part of the region. There's no guess cap, so a bad start isn't fatal, it's just expensive.

The pool is all 98 stations across the six lines. That's a genuinely good size for a daily game: big enough that you won't exhaust it, small enough that a regular rider can hold most of it in their head. Line knowledge matters more than you'd expect. The Silver line alone touches 34 stations in our data, the longest reach in the system, while the Yellow covers just 13, so a Yellow line guess narrows things fast. The busiest station in the dataset is Metro Center, and the oldest is Farragut North, opened in 1976 with the original Red line segment.

The Photo mode: name the station from its entrance

Washington is one of only four cities (with Paris, London and Berlin) that has DailyMetro's Photo mode, and honestly it might be the city where it works best. We gathered 56 real photographs of station entrances, blurred the names off the pylons and signs, and you get six tries to say which station you're looking at. The photo starts tightly cropped and zooms out a little with each miss.

Here's the thing about WMATA entrances: on paper they're all the same brutalist kit, a brown pylon, an escalator descending into the ground, some concrete. In practice the surroundings give everything away. The escalator canyon at Dupont Circle looks nothing like a suburban park-and-ride portal, and once you start noticing what's around the entrance (rowhouses? a federal facade? a parking structure?) you're playing a geography game with your own commute. Fair warning: you will start examining entrances in real life.

Beyond the daily

Every city edition also ships a Map mode, where the mystery station sits marked on an otherwise empty map and each wrong guess reveals another layer: first the shape of its lines, then their colors, then the streets, then the whole network. And if you want to study rather than guess, the Washington explorer has a reference page for every line and every station, with opening years and ridership from the same dataset the game runs on.

DailyMetro covers 21 cities in total, so when you've internalized all 98 WMATA stations (it happens faster than you'd think), New York's 442 are waiting.