ALLEGEDLY* is a daily guessing game about famous people and the documented things they did. Each morning one story goes up with the name redacted. You get three strikes to work out who it is, and every wrong guess buys you a clue.
It takes about ninety seconds to play. That is the entire product.
ALLEGEDLY* is published by Smart Chain LLC, 1180 N Town Center Dr, Suite 100, Las Vegas, NV 89144. It is a small independent project, not a media company, and it is not affiliated with any gossip outlet, tabloid, or news organisation.
The game is free. There is no account, no signup wall, and no app to install. Your streak and statistics live in your own browser's local storage and never touch a server. The only thing we record is an anonymous result — puzzle number, solved or not, how many guesses — so the game can tell you what percentage of readers cracked today's case.
Every puzzle is drawn from events that are already a matter of public record: criminal convictions, civil judgments, official rulings by governing bodies, and moments that happened live on television in front of millions of people.
That rule is not decoration. It is the reason the game exists in the form it does. There is an enormous, thriving genre of celebrity "blind items" built on anonymous tips, unverified rumour, and speculation about people's private lives. That genre is not what this is. We are not breaking stories, we are not passing along whispers, and we are not making claims that a court has not already made or a camera has not already caught.
What is left when you apply that filter is still a remarkable amount of material — because famous people have been doing documented, extraordinary, sometimes wonderful things on the public record for a hundred years. A Best Actor winner who went to prison and came back to become the highest-grossing star on earth. A world champion disqualified on live pay-per-view. A country singer who quietly funded a vaccine. All of it verifiable, none of it whispered.
The asterisk is a joke about the genre, not a hedge about the facts. Blind items traditionally end in "allegedly" as legal cover for claims nobody can stand behind. We kept the word and the newsprint styling because the format is fun, and dropped the part where the claims are unverifiable.
Roughly a third of the puzzle bank is not scandal at all. Some of the best cases in the game are about people doing something quietly extraordinary — an actor who spent years doing something generous with no press attached, a star who gave away a fortune without a campaign around it. They play exactly the same way. A redacted story is a redacted story, and it turns out "who did something wonderful" is a harder puzzle than "who got arrested," because the reflex is always to guess the villain.
Every case carries a difficulty rating from 1 to 7. A 1 is a story so famous that naming it is almost reflex. A 7 is a deep cut that rewards someone who has been paying attention for decades. The daily schedule mixes them deliberately so the game does not settle into a rhythm you can game.
If the daily is too easy, there is Hard Mode: two strikes instead of three, and no optional clues. If that is still not enough, the Night Edition runs a separate, harder case after dark.
If a case is wrong — a date, a charge, a detail, an outcome — we want to know, and we will fix it. Accuracy is the whole premise; a factual error in a game built on public record is not a typo, it is a broken promise. Write to us and it gets corrected.
Contact us here, or read the full editorial standards for exactly how cases are sourced and what gets rejected.