Alphabetish is a daily music word game. One artist or band name, letters sorted from A to Z, six guesses to work out who it is. All the right letters, not necessarily in the right order.
Alphabetising a band name does something strange to it. The name stays completely intact, every letter present and correct, and yet it becomes unrecognisable. THE ROLLING STONES turns into a row of tiles that looks like a filing error. Nothing has been hidden from you. You simply cannot see it.
That gap between "all the information is right there" and "I have absolutely no idea" is the whole game. It is also why the moment it clicks is so satisfying. You did not deduce the answer so much as suddenly recognise something that had been in front of you the entire time.
The look came before most of the mechanics. Sorted letters on tiles immediately suggested an old mechanical split-flap board, the kind that used to clatter through the alphabet in railway stations and airports before screens took over. Once that idea arrived, everything else followed: the amber glow, the dot-matrix lettering, the dark background, the idle animation that ticks over while you think.
It is a deliberate contrast. The typography pairs a monospaced terminal face against Playfair Display, a proper editorial serif, because the game sits somewhere between a machine and a music magazine.
Alphabetish is a small, self-contained web game written in React. There are no accounts, no logins and no servers holding your data. Your stats, streaks and results are stored in your own browser using localStorage, which means they belong to you and to the device you play on.
The trade-off is honest and worth stating: because there is no account, your stats do not follow you from your phone to your laptop. Each device keeps its own record. For a small daily puzzle, that felt like the right compromise.
Every act in the game was added by hand and checked, sorted across eight decades from the 1950s to the 2020s. Acts with digits in their names had to be left out, because numbers do not survive the alphabetising step and the resulting puzzles feel broken rather than hard. That is why you will not find certain very famous bands in here, and it is a source of ongoing mild frustration.
The list grows steadily. If there is a glaring omission, do let me know.
Alphabetish is made by Morning Sun Games, an independent one-person studio based in the United Kingdom, building small daily puzzle games for people who like music and words.
It is very much a solo project, made in evenings and at weekends, with informal quality assurance provided by my wife, who has strong opinions about button placement and has usually been right.
Alphabetish is free and always will be. If you play it regularly and want to help cover hosting, there is a Ko-fi link in the Support panel inside the game. There is no obligation whatsoever and nothing is locked behind it.
Got a suggestion, a bug, or an artist that absolutely has to be in the game? The contact page is the place.