What is Oboroge?
Oboroge (おぼろゲー) is a free daily Retro Game Wordle. Each day highlights one nostalgic game released in Japan. You pick candidates from the search list and get comparison feedback on release year, hardware, publisher, genre, and series until you find the answer or use up your tries.
Rules and core twist
You have eight guesses. After each attempt the game compares your pick with the target:
- Green = exact match (including both sides having no series).
- Yellow = close (year within ±3, or hardware from the same company).
- Gray = mismatch.
- Year arrows show whether the answer is newer or older.
Data rules are Japan-focused: year and hardware refer to the first Japanese home-console release (not arcade launch years), and publisher means the Japanese release publisher rather than the developer.
How to play
- Open oboroge.app after the daily reset at 00:00 Japan time.
- Type a retro title and select it from the candidate list.
- Read the year / hardware / publisher / genre / series feedback.
- Narrow the pool with those constraints and guess again (up to eight times).
- Share the result, review your stats, or browse the recent seven-day archive.
Tips
- Lock hardware family early; it often collapses the search space faster than genre alone.
- Treat yellow years as a ±3 window and walk guesses along that timeline.
- Remember ports do not reassign the first Japanese home hardware under the site's data rules.
Interpret the catalogue consistently
Suppose you remember a game from an arcade release but the search result refers to its later Japanese console version. Use the console year when interpreting the arrow. Likewise, a familiar developer name does not override a different Japanese publisher in the game's data.
Combine a yellow year with its arrow: the answer is within three years, and the arrow gives the direction. A yellow hardware result means the same hardware company, not necessarily the same console. These distinctions make the comparison rows useful even when your memory of the title is incomplete.