About

Bevel is a daily literary deduction game built for readers. Each day you're given a short passage drawn from a public-domain work, a paragraph or two of prose, and your challenge is to figure out who wrote it, when, where they were from, and what the book is called. No multiple-choice lists, no genre tags: just the writing itself, and your instincts as a reader.

The deduction unfolds across up to 5 guesses. With each attempt you submit your best guess for all four fields: author, decade, nationality, and title. Green means an exact match; yellow means you're close but not quite right. A new hint about the book or author is revealed after each guess, giving you a little more to work with as the round progresses.

Bevel rewards genuine literary knowledge but also teaches through play. Even when you don't recognise the work, the prose style, vocabulary, sentence rhythms, and sensibility are all evidence. One puzzle per day, shared by everyone, short enough to fit between meetings, but the passage will stay with you.

How to Play

• Read the short passage carefully, every word is a clue.
• Submit guesses for up to four fields: author, decade, nationality, and title.
• Green means an exact match; yellow means you're close (e.g. a nearby decade or the right country).
• A new hint about the book or author is revealed after each guess.
• You have 5 guesses to nail all four fields, a new passage resets every day.

Tips

• Pay close attention to prose style: sentence length, vocabulary, and tone often signal the era more reliably than the subject matter.
• Nationality clues hide in spelling conventions, idioms, and cultural references embedded in the text.
• Use early guesses to narrow the decade first; getting the time period right opens up the other fields.
• Don't be afraid to guess imperfectly early. Each wrong attempt unlocks a new hint worth having.
• All passages come from public-domain works, so the writing predates the mid-20th century: think classics, not contemporary bestsellers.

History

Bevel sits at the intersection of two modern trends: the daily deduction format made famous by Wordle, and a renewed interest in literary culture and reading. The game was built by a solo developer with a clear editorial mission — to make people feel like readers, not just players. Rather than asking trivia about books, Bevel uses the books themselves as the puzzle: a short excerpt is all you get, and the writing has to do the work.

Passages are drawn exclusively from public-domain works verified through Project Gutenberg's freely-distributed catalogue, whose decades of digitisation work keep the public-domain library accessible to readers everywhere. By anchoring its library there, Bevel ensures every passage is genuinely historical — literature that has already stood the test of time. The game is designed as the first piece of a larger reading platform, but its daily puzzle already makes a quiet case for a more literary kind of deduction game.