Alphabetish is a daily music puzzle. Every day, one artist or band name has its letters rearranged into alphabetical order, and your job is to work out who it is. You get six guesses. Everyone in the world plays the same puzzle on the same day.
Take the band Coldplay. Sort its letters from A to Z and you get:
That is what appears on the board. Every letter of the real name is there, in full, just in the wrong order. Nothing is added and nothing is taken away.
A few more, so the idea is completely clear:
Alphabetish is not one puzzle but several. As well as the main Music Acts pool, you can pick a decade and play only artists from that era, from the 1950s right through to the 2020s. Each category runs its own daily puzzle, its own puzzle number and its own streak, so a bad day in the 1980s will not damage your 1970s record.
Pick a decade you actually know and the game becomes far more forgiving. Pick one you do not and it becomes a genuinely tough challenge.
On easy and normal difficulty you can tap the MOVE badge to unlock the board. The tiles then behave like fridge magnets: drag them around, shuffle them into candidate words, and see what shakes loose. Tap DONE and they snap back to alphabetical order.
Nothing you do in rearrange mode counts as a guess and nothing is saved, so there is no risk in playing with it. For most people it is the single biggest difference between staring blankly at a board and cracking it.
Alphabetised names look impossible at first and then, quite suddenly, they do not. Here is what experienced players look for.
Letter count narrows the field enormously before you have decoded anything. Five letters rules out almost every multi-word band name. Twelve or more almost guarantees several words, which usually means a "The" or an "and" hiding in there.
A Q, X, Z or J on the board is a gift. There are not many acts with a Q in the name, and a Q almost always drags a U along behind it. Work outwards from the strange letters rather than from the common ones.
Certain letter groups betray whole words. Two Es plus an H and a T very often means "The". An A, an N and a D sitting together is frequently "and". Pull those out mentally, set them aside, and see what is left. The remainder is usually far more recognisable than the full board was.
Repeated letters carry a lot of information. Two Bs and two As is ABBA and almost nothing else. Three Es is unusual enough to be worth chasing. Doubles are where the alphabetical sorting accidentally tells you the most.
Because the board is sorted, all the vowels cluster at predictable points. A name with only one vowel across nine letters is going to be something unusual, stylised, or missing letters on purpose. That itself is a clue about the kind of act you are looking for.
If you are playing a decade category, use it. A board of 1950s letters is not going to resolve into a grime MC. Narrowing by era is the cheapest hint in the game and it is free.
This sounds daft and it works. Reading the letters aloud engages a completely different part of your memory than reading them silently, and names frequently surface that way when staring has failed.
When you finish, the share button copies a spoiler-free summary of how you did, which you can paste anywhere. It never includes the answer, so you can safely post it before your friends have played.
Stuck? Every puzzle is solvable, and the answer is always a real, reasonably well-known act. If a board looks like nonsense, try rearrange mode and pull out the small words first.