How to Play Rivaldle

Rivaldle is a daily Marvel Rivals guessing game with five different modes. Each mode reveals information about the hidden hero of the day in a different way. The rules are short, but each mode rewards slightly different knowledge — comic-book trivia, in-game ability familiarity, visual recall, lateral thinking. This page is the long-form version of every "How to Play" popup on the site, plus a strategy section for each mode and answers to the questions we get most often.

Shared rules across all modes

Every Rivaldle mode follows the same core structure. Once per day, the server picks a hidden hero from the Marvel Rivals roster. That hero stays the same for every player on Earth for the entire day — the puzzle resets at midnight UTC. Within a mode, you have unlimited guesses, but every guess reveals more information about the hero, so a careful player will solve in fewer guesses than a careless one. There is no time limit and no countdown clock during play. The only thing the game is tracking is whether you got today's answer at all and how long your daily streak is.

Guesses are submitted by typing a hero's name into the search bar and selecting them from the autocomplete list. Names are matched on the canonical English spelling regardless of the language you have the site set to, so a French player typing "Capitaine Amérique" will hit the same record as an English player typing "Captain America." Guesses do not need to be unique — if you type the same hero twice by accident, the second guess is silently ignored and does not count against you. Once you find the correct hero, the game is locked for the day in that mode and you cannot replay it; come back at the next reset.

Rivaldle does not require an account. Your guesses, completion state, and streak are stored in the localStorage of your browser. If you switch browsers or devices, you start fresh on the new one. If you clear your cookies, your streak resets. We do not have a way to recover lost streaks, because we do not have your data on a server in the first place.

Classic Mode

Classic Mode is the comparison-grid mode. You start by typing any hero's name. The game then displays that hero's row across eight columns: gender, species, affiliation, role, eye color, hair color, HP, and a final "year of comic origin" column hidden inside the search field. Each cell is colored based on how that hero's value compares to the hidden answer.

Two columns deserve a longer note. Eye color and hair color are stored as arrays because some Marvel heroes have more than one canonical answer — Storm, for example, has white hair and blue eyes; characters with cybernetic eyes or color-changing powers may have multiple entries. A yellow cell on either of those columns means your guess shares at least one value with the answer but not all of them. HP is a numeric column and works differently: a green cell means the HP value matches exactly, and a red cell shows an arrow pointing up or down to indicate whether the secret hero's HP is higher or lower than your guess. Use that arrow aggressively — it's the strongest single piece of information in any guess, because HP narrows the roster faster than any categorical column.

Classic Mode strategy

The optimal first guess is a hero in the middle of every column: a Vanguard around 650 HP, with common eye and hair colors, from a major affiliation. Magneto is a strong opener for exactly this reason — his 650 HP is shared with three other Vanguards (so the HP arrow narrows the field aggressively), his X-Men affiliation is the second-most common affiliation in the database, and his Mutant species cell is the largest species group in the roster. Once you have a couple of rows of feedback, switch to elimination guesses rather than coverage guesses: every guess after the second one should be designed to test a specific hypothesis, not to gather more information about the field.

The second-most-common Classic Mode mistake is locking onto the role column too early. The Duelist role has more than twenty heroes in the Rivaldle database, so a green role cell on a Duelist guess is genuinely not very narrowing. Pair role information with HP information before you commit. The third-most-common mistake is ignoring the year of comic origin hint that is shown in the column header on hover. We store the year each hero first appeared in Marvel comics — Captain America in 1941, Wolverine in 1974, Adam Warlock in 1967 — and the hint reveals whether the answer is older or younger than your guess. For long-time comic readers, this column is sometimes worth more than HP.

Silhouette Mode

Silhouette Mode displays the hero's official splash image with all the color information stripped out. You see the outline only. Each wrong guess reveals more of the image: first internal contour, then color blocks, then full art. The mode is faster than Classic Mode for some players and much slower for others. Silhouette recognition is a specific skill, and the puzzle rewards players who can read pose and proportion without reading color.

Silhouette Mode strategy

Look at the silhouette before you guess anything. The two most informative features are weapon or held object and hair shape. A horned helmet rules in Loki, Hela, and Thor. A bow rules in Hawkeye. A cape that flares wide rather than narrow is usually Doctor Strange or Scarlet Witch rather than Magik or Storm. A second pass should look at posture — Hulk and the Thing have wide shoulders and a low center of mass; Spider-Man and Black Panther have a crouched, predatory stance; Adam Warlock and Phoenix tend to be drawn floating with a long vertical line. Once you have a shape category in mind, your first guess should be the most common hero in that category, not the most distinctive one. You want to leverage the reveal, not solve the puzzle blind.

Resist the urge to throw guesses to "use up the silhouette reveal." Each guess reveals the next layer regardless of whether it was a good guess, so a wasted guess is genuinely wasted. The streak counter only cares whether you finished, but your share string includes the number of guesses, and the small social pleasure of a two-guess Silhouette solve is the entire point of the mode.

Emoji Mode

Emoji Mode shows you four emojis we hand-picked to gesture at the hidden hero. Each hero in our database has its own emoji string, written by us. The string is intended to be solvable but not literal — if a hero has a flag in their costume, we usually do not use a flag emoji unless that flag is the most defining visual element. Captain America is the rare exception. Most strings combine a power icon, a costume element, an affiliation hint, and one wild card chosen by feel.

Emoji Mode strategy

The single best mental model for Emoji Mode is to imagine you are the person who wrote the string. Ask yourself: if I had four emojis and I had to point at this hero, which four would I pick? Then ask the inverse: which heroes could be pointed at by these four emojis, and which of those is the most "obvious" answer? The mode is intentionally not a literal cipher. Two emojis often refer to the same attribute — for instance, both a thunderbolt and a hammer can refer to Thor — and that overlap is a fingerprint, not redundancy.

If you are stuck on Emoji Mode, the trick is to translate each emoji into a one-word concept and look for the hero whose Wikipedia summary contains the most of those words. A 🛡️ is "shield" or "defender." A 🐺 is "wolf" but also "feral." A 🌩️ is "thunder," "weather," or "anger." Map all four to concept words and scan the roster for matches.

Character Ability Mode

Character Ability Mode shows you the literal text of one of the hero's abilities — the same name that appears on the in-game ability bar. Your job is to identify the hero who owns that ability. The mode is the most punishing of the five for players who do not actually play Marvel Rivals, because ability names are not the kind of trivia you can intuit from comics. They are studio-authored. "FREEDOM CHARGE" is recognizably Captain America, but "DAGGERS OF DENAK" is only Doctor Strange if you have actually used the ability.

Character Ability Mode strategy

Three substrings are diagnostic. Country and political nouns ("FREEDOM," "AMERICA," "WAKANDA," "ATLANTEAN") almost always indicate national-themed heroes — Captain America, Black Panther, Namor. Mythological proper nouns ("AGAMOTTO," "FARALLAH," "MJOLNIR") indicate magic users or Asgardians — Doctor Strange, Thor, Hela, Loki, Magik. Material nouns ("VIBRANIUM," "ADAMANTIUM," "PROTON") narrow to a small list each. If the ability text uses a Marvel proper noun you do not recognize, search the comics rather than the game — most ability names are pulled from a hero's classic comic vocabulary, not from new game-specific lore.

Each hero has a different number of abilities. Cycling through abilities is randomized per day, so even if today's answer is, for example, Doctor Strange, the ability shown might not be his ultimate. Do not assume you are looking at an ultimate. The ability shown is one of six or seven per hero, picked uniformly at random by the server when it picks the day's answer.

Pixelation Mode

Pixelation Mode is the newest mode. It displays the hero's splash image at extreme pixelation — large colored blocks with no readable detail. Each wrong guess reduces the pixel size, gradually unblurring the image until you can identify the hero. The mode is faster than Silhouette Mode for players who recognize color palettes and slower for players who recognize shapes.

Pixelation Mode strategy

The first frame of Pixelation Mode is dominated by the hero's primary costume color and their background. Red-and-gold pixels almost certainly mean Iron Man, Phoenix, or Scarlet Witch. Green-and-purple pixels are Hulk, Loki, or Hawkeye. Black-with-an-accent is the largest cluster — Black Panther, Black Widow, Magik, Wolverine, Punisher, Moon Knight all live here. After your first guess unblurs the image, the second-most-informative feature is silhouette outline, which is now visible. Pixelation is essentially Silhouette Mode with color information added — use both cues together.

Players who are colorblind sometimes find Pixelation Mode harder than Silhouette Mode. We are aware. The in-game splash images use the same official artwork as Marvel Rivals, so any palette that is difficult in the game is also difficult here. If you have feedback about accessibility, please email us.

Streaks, sharing, and progress

Each mode tracks two values in your browser: your current streak, which is the number of consecutive days you have solved that mode, and your best streak, which is the longest current streak you have ever held in that mode. A streak in one mode does not affect streaks in other modes — it is genuinely possible to be on a 100-day Classic streak and a 2-day Emoji streak at the same time. If you skip a day in a mode, that mode's current streak resets to 0; the best streak persists.

The share string at the end of each round is just text. There is no image generation, no hidden tracking, and no link back to your account. The string includes the mode, the date, and the number of guesses you took. Pasting it into Discord or a group chat is the intended use; pasting it into Twitter is fine but tends to mangle the emoji spacing on some clients.

Frequently asked questions

What time does the puzzle reset?

Midnight UTC. For most US players this is in the evening; for most European players this is at the literal stroke of midnight; for most East Asia players this is around 8:00 AM. We picked UTC rather than local time so that the daily answer is the same for everyone simultaneously.

Why does a hero I expect to see not appear in the search?

Rivaldle's roster matches the live Marvel Rivals roster, not the broader Marvel Comics universe. If a hero is not in the game, they are not in Rivaldle. We add new heroes within a few days of their live release.

The HP for a hero looks wrong. Is this a bug?

HP values are pulled from the live Marvel Rivals client and are correct as of the most recent patch we have ingested. If you spot a discrepancy, please email rivaldleguesser@gmail.com with the hero name and the value you see in-game. We update the database within a week of any HP rebalance patch.

Can I change the language?

Yes. Click the language icon on the home page and select from English, Spanish, French, German, or Mandarin. The character database is fully localized, so HP, species, role, and ability names all switch with the language toggle.

Why did I lose my streak after clearing my cookies?

Rivaldle stores your streak in your browser's localStorage, which is technically not a cookie but is wiped by most "clear cookies" buttons. We do not store streaks on a server, so we cannot restore a cleared streak. We are sorry.

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Classic Silhouette Emoji Ability Pixelation