How to Play Brandle — Logo Guessing Game Guide
May 2026
Brandle is Capitalle's daily brand logo identification game. Each day a famous company logo is presented in a heavily blurred state, and your challenge is to identify the brand using up to eight guesses. With each wrong guess, the image becomes slightly sharper, revealing more detail — but every additional guess costs you points. Can you recognise the brand from almost nothing, or do you need every hint available?
The Basic Rules
At the start of each Brandle puzzle, you see a severely blurred version of a well-known brand logo. The blur is applied so heavily that individual letters, shapes, and even colors are hard to distinguish. You have eight guesses. Type any brand name into the search field and submit — if you are correct, the game ends and you win. If you are wrong, the logo becomes marginally clearer and you also receive one hint about the brand.
After your first wrong guess, you learn the brand's industry category — for example, Technology, Fast Food, Automotive, or Fashion. After your second wrong guess, you learn the country where the brand was founded. After your third wrong guess, you learn the approximate decade the brand was established. These three hints — industry, country, and age — are revealed progressively as you use guesses, giving you more information the more you spend.
How the Logo Blurring Works
The blurring in Brandle uses a Gaussian blur algorithm that smears pixel information across the image. At maximum blur — the state you see with your first guess available — the logo is essentially a smear of color with no readable text or sharp shapes. As you use guesses, the blur radius decreases in steps, gradually revealing edges, then rough shapes, then color gradients, and finally text and fine details.
Experienced Brandle players learn to extract information from even the most blurred state. Color is the most durable attribute — a bright red smear is very different from a deep blue one, and even at maximum blur you can usually determine whether a logo is primarily warm or cool toned, dark or light. Shape mass is the second extractable attribute — some logos are wide and horizontal, others are compact and circular, others have a distinctive tall vertical element. Learning to read these structural hints at high blur is what separates top players from casual ones.
Using the Industry Hint Strategically
The industry hint is the single most powerful piece of information in Brandle, and it arrives after just one wrong guess. If you are unsure about the logo after your initial look, spending one guess to unlock the industry category is almost always worth it. Knowing that the brand is in the Automotive sector immediately rules out hundreds of possibilities and confirms dozens of others.
Different industries have distinctive visual characteristics that help you once you know which category you are in. Technology companies tend to use clean, geometric logos with primary colors — think blues, greens, and greys. Fast food brands lean heavily on red and yellow, with bold, rounded typefaces designed for roadside visibility. Luxury fashion brands often use minimal black-and-white typography. Financial institutions favor deep blues, greens, and sans-serif fonts projecting stability. Once you know the industry, you are essentially playing a much smaller sub-game.
Narrowing by Country and Age
The country hint reveals where the brand was founded. This eliminates entire categories of guesses — if the brand is from Japan, you can stop considering European or American companies. Country of origin also correlates with visual style: Japanese brands often use clean minimalism, American brands favor bold accessibility, German brands often prioritize precision and structure, Italian brands frequently lean on elegance and heritage.
The decade hint tells you roughly when the brand was established. Brands founded before the 1950s typically have more traditional, ornate logos that have been modernized over time — think Coca-Cola or Ford. Brands from the 1970s and 1980s often reflect the geometric modernism of that era. Brands from the 1990s and 2000s frequently have the clean, scalable vector look that became standard in the digital age. Knowing the decade tells you what stylistic era you are working with, which narrows possibilities significantly.
What Makes Logos Hard to Identify
Some logos are deliberately chosen for Brandle because they are particularly challenging to identify under blur. Logos that rely entirely on text with a common typeface are very hard — without readable letters, a text-only logo at high blur is just a rectangular blob. Logos in black and white are also difficult because they lose their primary identifier (color) immediately.
Logos with complex, multi-element designs sometimes become easier under blur than simpler ones, because their distinctive overall shape remains visible even when details are gone. A logo with a very specific silhouette — like a bitten apple, or a swoosh, or a specific animal shape — is often easier to identify at high blur than a plain text logotype, even if the text logo is more famous. The most challenging logos in Brandle tend to be those of large but niche B2B companies, regional brands outside the player's home country, or brands that recently rebranded to a minimalist design.
Tips for Consistent Brandle Wins
The most effective Brandle strategy is to spend your first guess on a deliberate sacrifice if you are uncertain. Choose a brand in the industry you think most likely based on color alone, and use the industry confirmation to either validate or pivot your thinking. If the industry matches your guess, your second guess has a much higher probability of being correct. If it does not, you now have a definitive new direction.
Build a mental library of logos by industry. Spend a few minutes on a slow day browsing the logos of the top 50 brands in each major sector — technology, automotive, retail, food and beverage, banking, airlines. The more logos you have stored in memory, the faster your recognition becomes, and the more information you can extract from even a heavily blurred image.
Pay attention to the aspect ratio and mass of the blurred logo. A wide, landscape-oriented blur smear is very different from a tall, portrait-oriented one. Circular or square logos have a distinctive mass distribution even under heavy blur. These structural clues are always available from the very first glance and should inform your earliest guesses before any text becomes readable.