poconnections

Birthday Pokémon

Each of the 366 dates in the year maps onto the Pokédex. Choose a month and a day to see the Pokémon that belongs to it, the two or three that share the date, and the arithmetic behind the match.

How a date becomes a Pokémon

The national Pokédex holds 1025 Pokémon; a leap year holds 366 dates. Numbering the days 1 to 366 — with 29 February always counted, because a birthday is a day and a month, not a year — gives every date a number, and the match is made on the remainder left after dividing by 366. Day 209, 27 July, shares its remainder with No. 209, No. 575 and No. 941.

Every date therefore gets two or three Pokémon and none goes empty. The one each page leads with is always the lowest number, which places it in the first three generations — the most widely recognised stretch of the Pokédex. The newer generations arrive as the other Pokémon on the same date.

Why not simply 27 July → No. 727

It is the first idea anyone has, and it holds up until November. Written as a number, 1 November is 1101 and 31 December is 1231, while the Pokédex stops at 1025 — so every birthday in the last two months of the year would come back empty. Two months of the calendar is a steep price for a rule that is only slightly tidier.

Cycling through 366 costs something else: the match can no longer be read off the date at a glance. That is what the arithmetic on each date page is there for — every page states its day number and its remainder, so the result can be checked rather than taken on trust.

What each date page holds

A date page opens with its Pokémon at full size: name, Pokédex number, types, and the Pokédex category and entry wherever the games supply them in your language. Below come the others that share the date, then a table of the attributes the rest of this site is built on — generation, colour, habitat, evolution stage, height and weight.

The 366 dates are linked into a chain — every page carries the day before and the day after — and where one of its Pokémon has turned up in a past daily puzzle, the page links to that puzzle's answers as well.