How to Play Tuba Scuba, the Daily Rhyme Puzzle

Editor's note: I found Tuba Scuba a lot of fun, and very hard. Some clues had me stuck for a long time. Then I saw the answer and went "Duh!" The answer was in the clue the whole time.

Tuba Scuba is a free daily word puzzle from RhymeHamster, an online rhyming dictionary. Each day you get six short, silly clues. The answer to each one is two words that rhyme.

"Noah's boat with the lights off" is a dark ark. "A flip-flop in the tabloids" is a sandal scandal.

That is the whole idea. You read a clue, think of the thing it describes, then hunt for a way to say it with two words that rhyme. It sounds easy. On the hard clues it is not.

It plays in a web browser on a phone or a computer. There is nothing to download and you do not need an account.

All of the examples and screenshots below come from Tuba Scuba No. 5 (September 28, 2026), which RhymeHamster put in its press kit. If you want to try that puzzle cold first, it is in the Tuba Scuba archive. Come back after.

How to Play Tuba Scuba

When you open the day's puzzle you see six clue cards stacked down the page. Under each clue is a row of dashes, one for each letter, with a gap between the two words.

Screenshot courtesy of RhymeHamster.

The dashes tell you more than you might think. In the first clue, "A beautiful bird that left the pond for good", you can see the answer is two four letter words. That cuts the list of birds down fast. Swan fits. Now you need a four letter word that rhymes with swan and means "left for good". The answer is gone swan.

You type your answer straight into the boxes. There is no submit button. The game checks the pair as soon as the last box is filled.

The Three Rhyme Levels

The six clues are not all the same kind. They get longer as you go down the card, and each kind has its own silly name.

• Toob Scoob answers rhyme on one syllable, like dark and ark. These come first and are the warm up.
• Tuba Scuba answers rhyme on two syllables, like sandal and scandal. The last two beats of each word have to match.
• Tubaly Scubaly answers rhyme on three syllables. This is the last clue of the day and the hardest one. In No. 5 it was "The fundraiser only the cheerleaders are invited to", and the answer was popularity charity.

Each card is labelled, so you always know how many syllables need to match. That helps more than it looks. If the label says three syllables, you can stop trying short words.

The rhymes are strict. RhymeHamster is put together by hand by a working lyricist, and the game only uses perfect rhymes, the kind you could put in a song. So if your answer only nearly rhymes, it is not the answer.

How Many English Words Rhyme?

Most of them, but not by as much as you might think.

We took the 20,000 English words people use most and checked each one against all the others, using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, a free list of how about 135,000 words are said out loud. We counted a rhyme the way the game does: the sounds have to match from the last stressed vowel to the end of the word. Night and bright count. Sun and son do not, because they sound exactly the same.

Here is what we found. 61% of those 20,000 words have at least one perfect rhyme in the list. The other 39% have none.

Short words rhyme easily. 92% of one syllable words have a partner. The longer the part that has to rhyme, the fewer partners there are, and that is why the last clue of the day is the hardest. A Toob Scoob pair is out there for almost any word. A Tubaly Scubaly pair exists for fewer than one word in four.

Then there are the famous ones. Orange, silver, purple and month have no perfect rhyme anywhere in the 20,000 words. Nor do wolf, pint, husband or empty. A few of them match a rare word or a name in a big dictionary, but nothing you would put in a song.

At the other end, modernization rhymes with 367 of the common words, because so many English words end in "ation".

Hints and Scoring

You get five hints a day. They show up at the top of the board as five little seeds. Each card has its own HINT button, and pressing it spends one seed and drops a letter into each word of that answer.

Screenshot courtesy of RhymeHamster.

Look at the second card above. The clue is "A basset on his belly". The player was stuck, used a hint, and got a G at the start of the first word and an N in the second.

This is where the "Duh!" happens. A basset is a hound. A dog on his belly is on the ground. Ground hound.

Scoring is simple:

• 2 points for a pair you solve on your own
• 1 point for a pair you solve after using a hint
• Six clues, so 12 points is a perfect day

Screenshot courtesy of RhymeHamster.

This player used one hint and finished on 11. When you are done you can share your score or look at your stats. The game keeps a streak for days you play on the day.

Tips for the Hard Clues

Start with the thing the clue is describing. "A basset" is a hound. "Noah's boat" is an ark. In the No. 5 clues, one part of the clue points straight at one of the two answer words, so find that word before you start rhyming.

Then go through the rhymes for that word. Once you have hound, try found, round, sound, mound and ground, and read each one against the rest of the clue. "On his belly" fits ground.

Count the dashes. If you think the answer is "boat" but the first word has six dashes, it is not boat.

Use the level label. On a three syllable card, both words have to share the last three beats, so you can skip short words.

A hint costs you one point on that card, and you get five a day. Save them for a clue that has stopped you cold, not the first one that slows you down.

Mission: Ignition, the Other Daily Rhyme Game

RhymeHamster has a second daily game called Mission: Ignition. It works differently.

Each day there is one "launch word" painted on the side of a rocket. All ten answers rhyme with that word. You solve clues one at a time, counting down from T minus 10.

Screenshot courtesy of RhymeHamster.

On the day above the launch word was noodle. The first clue was "A dog with a pom-pom haircut", six letters. That is a poodle.

The clues start easy and get harder near the top of the tower. If you get stuck you can ask for the first letter, skip the clue and come back to it, or have the answer shown.

Screenshot courtesy of RhymeHamster.

Here the player has three answers lit up and is on clue four, "The snack that turns your fingers orange". The answer is two words, 12 letters, and they have used the first letter hint to get the C. It is a cheese doodle.

Get all ten and the rocket takes off. Do it without any help and you get three stars.

Screenshot courtesy of RhymeHamster.

The big difference from Tuba Scuba is that you know the rhyme before you start. Every answer ends like noodle, so you are only looking for the front of the word. In Tuba Scuba nobody tells you the rhyme. You have to find it yourself.

Playing Past Puzzles

Both games have an archive with a calendar of every puzzle since launch. Each day you have played shows your stars:

• Three stars if you used no hints
• Two stars if you used a hint
• One star if you had the answers shown

You can play a day you missed at any time. It still earns stars, but it does not count toward your streak.

Who Made It

RhymeHamster was made by Jeremy Desmon, a musical theatre writer and lyricist in New York City. He has taught a writing workshop on musicals and songwriting at Princeton for twenty years. He built the rhyming dictionary for his own work and then opened it up to everyone. It now covers about 118,000 words.

The daily games launched on September 24, 2026. Both share the site's mascot, Simon the hamster, who plays the tuba in flippers on the Tuba Scuba page.

If you like a daily puzzle that takes a few minutes and makes you laugh, try today's Tuba Scuba. If you want more games like it, we keep a list of daily word games worth playing.