Inflation Wordle

How the daily puzzle works

You are shown one Indian item and what it cost in a particular year, and you have six attempts to name that year. After each guess the game tells you whether the real year is earlier or later, so a sensible strategy is to halve the range each time: start somewhere near 1995, then move on the feedback. Everyone playing on the same day gets the same puzzle, and a new one appears at midnight.

Guesses run from 1970 to 2025. The present year is never the answer — today's prices are on every other page of this site, so it would give itself away.

Where the prices come from

Every puzzle is generated from the Indian price series behind the calculators on this site, compiled from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the Labour Bureau and the Reserve Bank of India. That covers more than forty everyday items — chai, petrol, milk, onions, gold, a movie ticket, a bus fare, a year of school fees — at five-year intervals from 1970, which works out to several hundred possible puzzles.

Because the puzzles are derived from that data rather than written by hand, the game cannot drift away from the figures the rest of the site uses.

Why it is harder than it looks

Most people anchor on the wrong decade, and the reason is instructive. Indian prices moved slowly through the 1970s and 1980s, then accelerated after the 1991 liberalisation, so a price that feels “old” is often more recent than you expect. A cup of chai cost ten paise in 1970 and was still only about a rupee in 1990 — two decades for a tenfold rise, then roughly another twentyfold in the three decades since.

Some items break the pattern entirely. Mobile calls and data have become dramatically cheaper in rupee terms, while gold, urban housing and school fees have risen far faster than the headline index. Averages hide that spread, which is part of why a single inflation figure so rarely matches anyone's experience.

To follow any single item properly, use the price tracker, or read Understanding Inflation for how the index is built.

Indian prices by decade

These are the figures the puzzles are drawn from. Reading them as a block is the fastest way to calibrate your guesses, because it shows how uneven the rises have been.

The Consumer Price Index itself rose about 53× over the same fifty-five years. Almost nothing in the table moved at that rate. Rice rose 43×, which is below the index, while a year of school fees rose roughly 1,750× — more than thirty times faster than the average that is supposed to describe it.

A strategy that works

Because the rises are so uneven, the reliable approach is not to recall a price but to bracket it. Ask which side of 1991 the number feels like: liberalisation is the hinge, and prices moved far faster after it. Then use the feedback to halve what is left. Six guesses is enough to binary-search a fifty-five-year range twice over, so precision matters much less than not wasting the first two attempts on a wild swing.

It also helps to know which category you are looking at. If the item is a staple grain or pulse, the price has risen relatively slowly and a low number can still be surprisingly recent. If it is education, gold or property, a number that looks modern may be a decade older than you think.

Figures here are educational estimates, not financial advice.