Guess the Recipe
Four ingredients on screen, and they are the four least helpful ones. Every dish in this deck has exactly eight ingredients listed, ordered from least distinctive to most, so the opening rung is salt, oil, onion and garlic — the things half the world's cooking contains.
That ordering is the whole game. Shuffle a list and each round becomes either instant or impossible; keeping the boring half first means the difficulty ramps rather than flips.
Name the dish from its ingredients.
Play Guess the RecipeWhere to look in a list of four
Ignore the aromatics and read the fat, the acid and the starch. Butter versus olive oil versus a neutral oil versus coconut milk narrows the world immediately. Vinegar, lime, lemon, tamarind and yoghurt each belong to different kitchens. Rice, wheat flour, corn tortillas, potatoes and noodles are the load-bearing carbohydrate, and there is usually one.
Then look for anything unusually specific in the first four, because the ordering means a specific ingredient appearing early is a strong signal — if a dish needs it enough to rank above onion, it is central to what the dish is.
The last two entries are where the answer lives. Saffron. Miso. Achiote-marinated pork with pineapple. Doubanjiang. Those are placed there deliberately, which is also why buying the last rung so often ends the round instantly.
The ladder
Three rungs and no written clues: four ingredients, then six, then all eight. It is one of only two games here with a three-rung ladder, so the whole round is worth 1000, then 620, then 380.
The steps are computed from the length of the list rather than hardcoded, so a dish with a different number of ingredients would still divide into half, three quarters and the lot.
How the lists were built
63 dishes, eight ingredients each, and nothing invented. Where a dish has a canonical version — carbonara, paella valenciana, the various pestos — that is the one described, and where the authentic composition was not certain the dish was left out rather than guessed at. A recipe game that teaches you the wrong recipe is worse than no game.
The spread is 36 origins: five each from Italy, France and Japan, four from Mexico, three each from Greece, Korea and China, and then a long tail through Peru, Brazil, Louisiana, Quebec, Ukraine, Ethiopia, West Africa, the Levant and the Philippines. After the round ends you get a note about the dish — that the vertical spit came to Mexico with Lebanese immigrants, for instance, and the pork and the pineapple are local additions.
Scoring
Ten rounds, three rungs: 1000, 620, 380, plus up to 160 for speed and a streak multiplier reaching 2×. With only three rungs, two wrong guesses end a round, so it is worth typing a candidate into the search box and reading what comes back before committing — the guess list is every dish in the file, and seeing the neighbours often changes your mind.