Tubele is a daily guessing game in the same vein as Wordle. Every day there's one London station. You get six guesses, and after each one you're told how many stops away you are, along with a few clues about the answer. Underground, Overground, DLR and the Elizabeth line are all in, which comes to around 420 stations, so it won't run dry for a while.
It's live at tubele.app.
Stops, not miles
The first prototype gave you a compass direction and a straight-line distance after each guess. It was useless. Nobody in London thinks about the city that way; they think in the Tube map, which bends geography to fit the page. So the feedback is network distance instead: how many stops between your guess and the answer, worked out by walking TfL's route data as a graph. Guess Bank when the answer is Moorgate and you're one stop off, even though the map puts them in different postcodes.
Getting that right was the main bit of actual work. Express stopping patterns and interchange handling both produce nonsense distances if you're not careful, and the first graph had both problems.
How it was built
The idea came out of a brainstorm with Claude for daily games in the Wordle and Worldle vein. I got a playable prototype in the chat, played it until it felt fair, then handed the whole thing over to Claude Code for the real build. A small pipeline pulls stations and route sequences from the TfL API and snapshots them, so the game itself is static and the data only changes when I say so.
It's hosted on Cloudflare. Analytics is a Worker writing to a D1 database, one row per game, with a client-side outbox that retries if the request doesn't land. Enough to see retention and difficulty, and no third-party tracking.
Launch
I posted it to r/LondonUnderground and a couple of other subs, and 552 people played it overnight. The answer schedule for launch week got some scrutiny, because nobody wants Silver Street on day three.
At the time of writing we're on day five, and around 1,800 people have played. Between the daily puzzle and practice mode that's close to 3,000 games, and a core of players are coming back every day, which is more than I expected from a Saturday side project.