Daily Brains · three word-picture riddles a day, and the game heckles you.
Rude Rebus is the word-picture puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). Every day the whole world gets the same three cards. Each card hides a word or phrase in the way it is laid out: HEAD written over HEELS is "head over heels", a 1 inside MILLION is "one in a million". The cards get harder through the day and through the week, and a smug upside-down face comments on every guess. Cheeky, never nasty: everything is family-friendly.
STORY & LORE
The bank
448 hand-built rebuses: 100 gentle, 150 cheeky, 113 tricky, 55 nasty and 30 extreme. A few dozen are classic newspaper rebuses (MIND over MATTER, READING between two lines); the rest are original constructions for this game. Each one carries its answer, a one-line explanation shown once the card is over, and a hint for the first nudge.
Monday gentle, Sunday rude
The weekday sets the difficulty: Monday deals gentle, gentle, cheeky; the middle of the week mixes cheeky and tricky; Friday and Saturday add a nasty card; Sunday is one nasty and two extreme cards that stack two or three tricks at once (emoji homophones, letter maths, position and crossings-out together). The header shows the day and its mood, from "Monday · Gentle" to "Sunday · Extreme".
No spoilers in the page
Answers are never in the page as text. A guess is checked against a hash of its letters, words are checked one by one the same way, and the answer and explanation are scrambled until the card is solved or lost.
HOW IT PLAYS
Reading a card
Position is a word (over, under, in, between, high, low, left). Size, colour, spacing and thickness count (big, little, red, wide, thin). Crossed out means no, without or -less. 2 is to or too, 4 is for, @ is at, = is is and > is better than. Emoji say their name or sound like a word: a ewe is you, the sea is see, a bee is be. Backwards, upside down, mirrored, scattered and broken words all mean something.
Guessing
Letter boxes show how many letters each word has. Type on the on-screen keyboard or a real one and press Enter. Any word you get right turns green and locks in place. Six wrong guesses on a card and it is roasted: the answer is shown and the card scores nothing. Give up is there too (tap twice).
Nudges and scoring
The three cards are worth 100, 200 and 300 points, so the day's maximum is 600. Each card has two nudges: the first shows a cheeky hint about the theme, the second fills in the first letter of every word. Each nudge costs 25% of the card and each wrong guess 10%, but a solved card always keeps at least 20%. Solving any card keeps the streak alive; three solved with no nudges is a perfect day.
Sharing
The share line is spoiler-free: "🙃 Rude Rebus #25 · 3/3 · 1 nudge", the day and score, then one square per card: 🟩 clean solve, 🟨 solved with a nudge or a wrong guess, 🟥 roasted.
THE WEEK
| Day | Mood | Cards |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Gentle | gentle · gentle · cheeky |
| Tuesday | Cheeky | gentle · cheeky · cheeky |
| Wednesday | Sassy | cheeky · cheeky · tricky |
| Thursday | Rude | cheeky · tricky · tricky |
| Friday | Very Rude | tricky · tricky · nasty |
| Saturday | Downright Rude | tricky · tricky · nasty |
| Sunday | Extreme | nasty · extreme · extreme |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Solve at least one card | 15 Tickets |
| All three, no nudges (perfect) | +25 Tickets |
| Cheeky Beginner (first solve) | 🙃 Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Rebus Royalty (perfect day) | 👑 Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Thick Skin (3-day streak) | 😏 Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Survived Sunday (7-day streak) | 😈 Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Unroastable (30-day streak) | 🔥 Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch version in Daily Brains.
- 448 rebuses across five difficulty levels, dealt three a day by weekday (Monday gentle, Sunday extreme); no day repeats for well over a year.
- Typographic cards drawn live (position, size, colour, rotation, mirroring, strike-throughs, emoji), letter-count boxes, per-word green locks, two nudges, six lives per card.
- Hashed answers, scrambled explanations, streaks, statistics, share line and cloud-mirrored progress.