How to play Catchdle
Catchdle is a daily timing game with a persistent fish collection. Play as a guest or create an account to return to your collection on another device.
Your first catch
- Choose your angler's appearance and select Start fishing.
- Select Cast. Watch the fish icon and the moving green rectangle.
- Click the fish while its whole icon is inside the rectangle. Space or Enter also submits a timing attempt.
- Keep a successful catch for your collection, or sell it for coins.
Each encounter allows three attempts. The first two misses let you try again without using a daily cast. You can select Not now and resume later that same fishing day. A success spends one cast; a third miss spends one cast and brings back salvage such as an old boot. There is no encounter time limit.
Daily casts, tides and the leaderboard
Players start with 5 casts per day. The fishing day resets at midnight in America/New_York, including daylight saving time. Check your remaining casts and reset countdown in the game. Food can add bonus casts.
Today's waters explains the current tide and lucky fish. Tides change the lake and selection weights; the lucky fish has an increased selection chance. These are probabilities, so a rare catch is never guaranteed. Seasonal events add limited-time fish to the selection pool.
The daily leaderboard uses your single most valuable catch, rather than the sum of your catches. A smaller later catch does not replace your best. Equal values favor the earlier catch, then username. Selling or cooking a catch does not erase its recorded score.
Keep, sell or display?
Inventory starts with all catches; Filter fish offers group and size browsing. Size is relative to that species' weight range, so a large minnow is not compared to a large marlin. Small, medium and large fish have value multipliers of one, two and three. The displayed coin value also determines leaderboard placement.
The aquarium holds 100 items. Removing a fish from the tank returns it to inventory. Selling it removes the fish and adds its value to your wallet. If the tank is full, swap out a displayed fish to make room. Unanswered catches are saved in inventory, so closing the game does not discard them.
Cooking at the campfire
Select one to four individual fish from inventory or the aquarium, review the ingredients, then confirm. A matching recipe consumes those fish and stores a dish in your Pantry. An invalid combination consumes nothing. Cooking a displayed fish also frees its tank slot. Ingredient order does not matter.
| Dish | Ingredients | Bonus |
|---|---|---|
| Lakeside Skewers | Lakewater + Lakewater | Extra casts |
| Golden Chowder | Lakewater + Deep sea | Gold on successful catches for 24 hours |
| Wanderer's Broth | River + Lakewater | Extra casts |
| Coral Curry | Reef + Deep sea + River | Gold on successful catches for 24 hours |
| Moonlit Hotpot | Lakewater + Lakewater + Mythical + Deep sea | Higher rare selection weights for 24 hours |
| Starlight Feast | Mythical + Reef + River | Extra casts |
| Celestial Banquet | Mythical + Mythical + Mythical + Mythical | Extra casts |
Higher average ingredient rarity improves dish quality and its bonus. Use a dish from Pantry to activate it. A bonus of the same active type must expire before another can be used; the unused dish stays in your pantry. Gold and rarity bonuses can run together. Trash cannot be cooked.
A single non-legendary fish makes a cooked-fish meal that pays its stored value when used. A single Legendary fish makes a Chef's Box with a dish or an unowned chef cosmetic. Keep a favorite fish if you want it to remain in your aquarium.
Your Journal
Open Menu → Journal or press D for today’s summary, catches, pinned goals, weekly objectives and lifetime species records. Records and discoveries remain when fish are sold or cooked. Weekly objectives reset Monday at midnight Eastern; claim each reward once. Missing days does not erase your collection.
In the browser, Journal can prepare a downloadable catch card or daily recap. Aquarium sharing is optional: create a read-only link in Aquarium and stop sharing there to disable it. The link shows your username and currently displayed fish.
Accounts and returning to the lake
Create an account from the guest profile to preserve that guest's catches and remaining casts. Signing into an existing account instead leaves the guest's score under its generated name. Add a recovery email if you want password resets. Shop items change appearance; they do not improve catch odds or grant daily casts.
If loading stalls, check your connection and reload. The first visit downloads the browser's Python runtime. An unfinished encounter resumes on the same fishing day, and request retries do not spend an extra attempt.