Guess the Sport
A photograph of play cropped to 7x, which lands on a boot, a bit of kit, or a painted line on the ground. Sport photographs are busy enough that even a deep crop hits something, and what it hits is usually more useful than a wide shot would be.
90 sports: the Olympic programme, plus the games that are enormous in one country and unheard of in the next. Sepak takraw, kabaddi, hurling, shinty, pesäpallo, jai alai, buzkashi and tug of war are all in here.
Name the sport from a close crop of the action.
Play Guess the SportThe surface is the answer
Start under the players. Sprung hardwood with a heavy varnish and multiple sets of painted lines is an indoor court — basketball, handball, netball, badminton, volleyball, futsal — and the line colours separate them, because a hall painted for three sports uses a different colour for each. Ice is unmistakable and then splits by markings: red and blue lines mean hockey, a set of concentric circles means curling, and a bare sheet means figure or speed skating.
Outdoors, read the grass. Mown stripes on close-cut turf mean football, rugby or cricket; long rough grass at the edge of a shorter area means golf. Clay is orange and leaves marks on the players. Sand means beach volleyball or a throwing pit.
Line width and colour are worth more attention than they get. A single thick white line is field sport marking; thin coloured lines in several directions is an indoor multi-court; a solid painted area with a hard boundary is a key, a crease or a service box.
Kit and equipment
Protective equipment is a fast classifier. Helmets with a face cage mean ice hockey, lacrosse or American football, and the shoulder padding separates the last from the first two. Bare feet in a white uniform with a coloured belt means judo, taekwondo or karate. Wrapped hands mean boxing or muay thai. No padding, no shoes and a rope area means wrestling or sumo.
Then footwear, which is under-used and highly informative. Studs mean grass. Flat soles with a gum rubber edge mean an indoor court. Skates, boots with a stiff cuff, or cleats bolted to a plate each belong to a single small set of sports.
The ball, when it appears, is often the last thing to help rather than the first — it is small, in motion, and frequently blurred. Do not wait for it.
The ladder
7x, 4x, 2.4x, 1.4x. Four rungs, and the deepest opening crop of any of the zoom games apart from the animal deck. The final rung is still a slight crop, so a round can end with the answer just outside the frame.
Photographs come from Wikipedia's sport articles, which almost always lead with a wide shot of play. That is exactly what a deep crop needs: kit, pitch markings and equipment all survive the zoom even when the players do not.
Scoring
Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380 and 240. Because the deck deliberately includes sports most players have never watched, an honest strategy is to spend rungs freely on the unfamiliar ones and bank the points on the ones you can name from a patch of turf.