How to play
Every game here is built on the same idea. A round opens with the least information it can give you — a tenth of a second of audio, two tiles of forty-eight, a patch of feathers at five times magnification — and you answer from that if you can. If you cannot, you buy a better look, and the round is worth less when you win it.
Nothing here needs an account. Open a game and play it; scores save to the device you are on. Signing in with Google is available and buys you two specific things, described at the bottom of this page.
The reveal ladder
Each game has a ladder of three to five rungs, and the labels tell you what each one gives: 0.1s, 0.5s, 1.5s, 3s, 5s in the song game; 2, 6, 13, 24 and 36 tiles in the video game deck; Cold, Decade, Setting, Who says it in the film-line game. The button that buys the next rung is labelled with the verb that fits — Zoom out, Hear more, Sharpen, Open more, Give me a clue — and it always shows what it will cost you in points before you press it.
Rungs only go one way. There is no way back up the ladder, and no way to see less of a picture once you have seen more of it.
Running off the bottom of the ladder ends the round at zero. So does pressing Skip round, which exists for the rounds you know you are not going to get and would rather not spend thirty seconds proving it.
A wrong guess costs a rung
This is the rule that makes the whole thing a game rather than a quiz. Guessing wrong does exactly what buying a rung does: it drops you one step down the ladder and one step down the points. It does not end the round, and it does not cost you anything extra.
Which means an early guess is a real bet rather than a free roll. In the games with a searchable answer list — most of them — the cheap move is to type a candidate into the box and read what comes back without submitting it, because seeing which options exist is free and submitting the wrong one is not.
In the four-option games, the arithmetic runs the other way. A cold guess with four buttons wins outright a quarter of the time, and losing still leaves you on the next rung with three options left, so guessing before you buy is defensible.
Three ways of answering
Search. A text box against the game's full answer list — every animal, every brand, every word. The list is deliberately not narrowed to the rounds in your deck, because a short list is a large hint.
Choice. Four buttons, used by the capital, language and quote games. The three wrong answers are always drawn from the same family as the right one: capitals from the same region, languages from the same family, people from the same field. Mixing them would give the answer away by process of elimination.
Year. A picker for the release-year game, which is also the only game that pays partial credit — one year off is worth 60 per cent, two years 35, three years 15.
Streaks, speed and the clock
Consecutive correct rounds build a streak multiplier, worth a tenth more per round up to double at ten in a row. It resets to nothing the moment you lose a round, which is why abandoning a hopeless round early is sometimes worse than the zero suggests — the zero is not the expensive part, the broken streak is.
Answering quickly is worth up to 160 points, tapering to nothing over twenty seconds. That is a bonus rather than a pressure: it is worth roughly two thirds of the last rung, so thinking for another ten seconds is nearly always cheaper than guessing wrong.
One game has a clock. Guess the Country gives you thirty seconds per round, because looking around a street is the game and without a limit you could stand there all day. The clock does not reset when you buy a clue — otherwise a skip would be a way to buy time as well as information.
Keyboard
Space plays or replays the clip, and falls back to revealing more in games that have nothing to play. R buys the next rung. S abandons the round for zero. Enter moves on once a round is over.
In the search games those shortcuts stay out of the way while you are typing, because R and S are letters. Escape leaves the search box and hands the shortcuts back.
Leaderboards, names and signing in
Every game has its own board, showing score, rounds won and best streak. Without a Supabase project configured the board says This device and holds your own last fifty runs; with one it says Global and shows everybody's.
You are given a generated name — an adjective, a noun and two digits — which you can change in Settings at any time, up to twenty characters. That name is the only thing stored about a player.
Signing in with Google is optional and never required to play or to post a score. It buys exactly two things: a name that follows you between browsers, and a Jump back in row of your recent games on the home page. That row is deliberately hidden when signed out, because a device's history and an account's history are not the same thing.