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How Soulsdle Clues Work: A Strategy Guide to Every Column

2026-10-24 · 9 min read · Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, Dark Souls III, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, Nightreign

Soulsdle looks like Wordle with bosses: you guess a name, a row of coloured tiles tells you how close you were, you guess again. That description is accurate and also undersells how much information each row carries if you know exactly what is being compared. This guide is written from the comparison code the site actually runs, so every rule below is how the game behaves, not a guess about it. Some of the rules are obvious. A few of them are the reason you lost your streak last Tuesday.

Classic mode draws from a pool of 244 bosses across eight games at the time of writing: 19 from Demon's Souls, 26 from Dark Souls, 41 from Dark Souls II, 25 from Dark Souls III, 31 from Bloodborne, 22 from Sekiro, 70 from Elden Ring and 10 from Nightreign. The daily answer is picked from the whole pool with equal odds per boss, which means roughly three days in ten the answer is an Elden Ring boss. That single fact should already shape your first guess.

How the daily answer is chosen

Every mode has its own answer each day, and every game filter has its own answer too: the Dark Souls-only Classic puzzle is a different puzzle from the all-games one, so you can play both without spoiling either. The selection is deterministic - everyone on the same date gets the same boss - and the game guarantees that today's answer is never the same as yesterday's for the same mode and filter. Beyond that there is no memory: a boss can come back a week later, and nothing stops it.

Classic mode has no guess limit. You can keep going until you find it or give up, and giving up ends the day for that puzzle. Silhouette mode is the exception, with fifteen attempts.

The seven Classic columns, one by one

Game

Green if your guess is from the same game, grey otherwise. There is no partial state, so Dark Souls III is not considered close to Dark Souls. This is the most important column in the game because almost every other column becomes more useful once it is green.

Region

Green only on an exact match of the region name, grey otherwise. There is no partial for being in the same game, and no partial for being geographically nearby. Two things to know about region. First, the granularity varies by game: in the older games, region tends to be the specific area, like Anor Londo or Iron Keep, while Elden Ring uses macro regions like Limgrave, Caelid or Liurnia of the Lakes. Second, every Shadow of the Erdtree boss in the pool shares a single region, Realm of Shadow. A green region on a DLC Elden Ring guess narrows the field a lot less than it seems to.

Type

Type is a set, and more than half the bosses in the pool have more than one type. The rule is strict: green means your guess has exactly the same set of types as the answer, no more and no fewer. Orange means at least one type is shared. Grey means none are.

This makes orange the most informative colour on the board. If your guess was Dragon and Beast and the tile came back orange, the answer is a Dragon, a Beast, or both plus something else - and if it is not both, you know it is not exactly that set. Some types are also nearly game-exclusive in the data. Demigod appears only on Elden Ring bosses. Demon is concentrated in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Humanoid is the most common type overall and the least useful as a confirmation.

Weakness

Weakness uses the same set rule as type: green for the exact same set, orange for any overlap, grey for none. The trap is the empty set. Plenty of bosses in the data have no listed weaknesses - every boss from Demon's Souls, Sekiro and Nightreign, most of Bloodborne, and about half of Elden Ring. Because an empty list matches another empty list exactly, guessing a boss with no weaknesses against an answer with no weaknesses gives you a green tile.

That green is real information. It tells you the answer has no listed weaknesses at all, which rules out the entire Dark Souls trilogy in one move, since every boss from those three games has at least one. Equally, if you guess a boss with no weaknesses and get grey, the answer has some, and Demon's Souls, Sekiro and Nightreign are gone. Some individual weaknesses also cluster: Frost appears only on Dark Souls III and Elden Ring bosses, Dark only on Dark Souls II and III, and Standard only on Dark Souls and Dark Souls III.

DLC

The DLC tile shows the name of the expansion your guess comes from, or No for a base-game boss. It turns green when both bosses come from the same expansion, or when both are from a base game. It is easy to read DLC as a yes/no column and miss that it is actually naming the expansion: a green on Shadow of the Erdtree tells you the game as well, while a green on No tells you very little, since most bosses are base-game.

Souls

Souls, runes, echoes: the reward for the kill. This column only gives you an arrow if your guess and the answer are from the same game, because a rune total in Elden Ring and a soul total in Dark Souls are not on the same scale. If the games differ, the tile just shows your guess's value with no direction. Once the game column is green, souls becomes one of the sharpest tools you have, because it gives you a direction within a list you have already narrowed. Some entries have no known value and display a question mark.

Health

Health always gives you an arrow when both values are known, even across games. That is the one comparison in Classic that does not care about scale, and it is worth thinking about. The median Elden Ring entry has more than twice the health of the median entry from the older games, and Elden Ring's late bosses run into the tens of thousands while most older bosses sit in the low thousands. So an up arrow after guessing a Dark Souls boss is a strong hint toward Elden Ring, and a down arrow after guessing a late Elden Ring demigod tells you almost nothing about which older game the answer belongs to.

There are a couple of outliers that can mislead you. Vendrick's entry in Dark Souls II carries a huge health figure compared with the rest of that game, so an arrow off Vendrick behaves more like an arrow off an Elden Ring boss. And every Sekiro and Nightreign boss has no comparable health value in the data, along with a handful of others, mostly from Bloodborne. When either side of the comparison is unknown, the tile shows a question mark with no arrow. That cuts both ways: if you guess a boss whose health you know is listed and still get a question mark, the answer itself has no health value, which points hard at Sekiro, Nightreign or Bloodborne.

A full walkthrough

Here is a real sequence played against one answer, with the actual tiles the game produces.

Guess one: Ornstein and Smough. Game grey, region grey, type grey (Knight), weakness orange (Fire and Lightning), DLC grey, souls neutral because the games differ, and health arrow up from 4,287. We now know the answer is not from Dark Souls, is not a Knight, shares at least one of Fire or Lightning, comes from a DLC, and has more health than Ornstein and Smough. That DLC grey is worth pausing on: since Ornstein and Smough are base-game, grey means the answer is from an expansion.

Guess two: Ancient Dragon from Dark Souls II, chosen to test the Dragon type. Game grey, type orange (Dragon and God), weakness orange (Lightning), DLC grey, health up from 6,800. Now the answer is a Dragon or a God but not exactly both, it is weak to Lightning, it is from neither Dark Souls nor Dark Souls II, it is a DLC boss, and it has more than 6,800 health.

That combination points strongly at Dark Souls III. Every Shadow of the Erdtree and Old Hunters boss in the data has an empty weakness list, so a confirmed Lightning weakness rules both expansions out, Nightreign's DLC entries have none either, and Demon's Souls and Sekiro have no DLC bosses at all. What is left is the Dark Souls III expansions. Guess three: Slave Knight Gael, to confirm the game and probe the Ringed City. Game green, region green (The Ringed City), DLC green, type grey, weakness grey, souls arrow up from 120,000, health arrow up.

Only two other bosses in the pool share game, region and DLC with Gael. Halflight shares Gael's exact type set, which has just been ruled out, and gives fewer souls. The last one standing is a Dragon weak to Lightning with more souls than Gael. Guess four: Darkeater Midir. Seven green tiles.

Four guesses, and the two that did the most work were the ones that came back mostly grey.

Strategy that follows from the rules

• Open with a boss whose game is large and whose type set has two types. Elden Ring guesses confirm or eliminate the biggest slice of the pool in one go, and a two-type set gives you a better chance at an orange.
• Use one early guess to probe the weakness column with an empty-weakness boss or a boss with several weaknesses. Either a green or a grey splits the games cleanly.
• Do not chase a green region before the game is confirmed. Region has no partial state, so a region guess outside the right game is wasted.
• Once the game is green, switch to guesses that bracket the souls and health values. Two arrows in opposite directions pin the answer down fast.
• Read the DLC column as a name, not a checkbox. A green on an expansion name is often enough to list the remaining candidates in your head.

The other modes, briefly

The NPC mode uses a different set of columns: game, location, role, species, gender, merchant and covenant. Location has a partial state - orange when the character is from the same game but met somewhere else - which makes it more forgiving than Classic's region. Covenant is orange when both characters belong to some covenant but not the same one. Everything else is exact.

Quote mode shows a line spoken by the character, with their name masked out of the quote so it cannot give itself away. Each wrong guess unlocks one more hint, in order: the game, then the role, then the location, then the gender. Silhouette mode starts with a heavily blurred image of a boss that sharpens with each guess but never fully resolves until the puzzle is over, and the image files are named so that the address does not reveal the boss either. You get fifteen tries.

None of this replaces knowing the games. But the difference between a four-guess solve and a twelve-guess one is usually not knowledge, it is reading the tiles you already have. Go and lose a streak with better information.