Guess the Animal
The round opens on a patch of animal magnified eight times, which is generally not enough of it to be a body part. It is a pattern: spots, bars, a gradient, or a field of one colour with a texture in it.
Pattern is enough far more often than people expect. Most of the 94 animals in the deck are identifiable from their markings alone by the second or third rung, well before anything anatomical arrives.
Name the animal from a patch of fur, feather or scale.
Play Guess the AnimalReading a pattern
The big cats are the clearest lesson. A jaguar's rosettes have spots inside them; a leopard's rosettes are empty; a cheetah's spots are solid and round. All three read as orange with black marks at low magnification and separate cleanly the moment you look at what is inside the marks.
Stripes carry direction and spacing. A tiger's are vertical, irregular and taper to points; a zebra's are broader, and the pattern on the rump differs by species. Bars that run across a feather rather than along it mean a bird of prey or a game bird.
Then the substrate. Fur has depth and a soft edge; feathers resolve into parallel barbs with a visible shaft; scales are hard-edged, repeating and reflective. Amphibian skin is the odd one out — wet, slightly translucent, and often intensely saturated, which is a poison dart frog and almost nothing else in this pool.
What the deck actually contains
94 animals, and despite the name they are not all mammals: the list runs through birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects and a substantial marine section. A blue-white field with a soft mottle is as likely to be a beluga-adjacent whale flank as anything terrestrial, and a very regular hexagonal pattern is a honeycomb-scaled reptile rather than a mammal.
That breadth is worth internalising because it changes your priors. If a crop looks like nothing that grows on a mammal, stop trying to make it one.
The ladder
8x, 5x, 3.2x, 2x, 1.3x. The second rung is where the pattern gains a boundary — the edge of a stripe field, the transition from flank to belly — and the fourth is where an eye, an ear or a beak usually appears. The reveal shows the whole photograph with Wikipedia's own one-line description under it.
Photographs come from species articles on Wikipedia, which lead with a single clear picture of the animal. Genus and family pages tend to lead with a range map or a plate of engravings, which is no use at all, so the seed list points only at species.
Scoring
Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380, 240 and 150. A strong run is one where you are committing on the second rung: the first is genuinely hard, and the difference between 620 and 380 across ten rounds is the difference between a good score and an average one.